you could try vagrant, not sure if its the VDI that you were referring to, but I would say that setup generally seems smoother inside of linux vs. other environments (so it's worth it to deal with the extra complexity of a vm)

there are a bunch of github projects that you can get that has everything to setup a VDI- this one seems popular: https://github.com/amaia/rails-starter-box

there's also a railscast about it: http://railscasts.com/episodes/292-virtual-machines-with-vag...