How about Virtual Machines, Virtualization and Jumpbox.  Today I happened upon a video for setting up Joomla using Jumpbox. The video can be found here. In less than 10 minutes (assuming you already downloaded everything) you can have your own instance of Joomla running on a VM.  The performance of the VM was pretty fast as well. The real value I see is in deployment. That could save some bucks. To have fully configured apps deployed as virtual hard drives.

 VirtualBox is free.  VMWare is nothing but good stuff.  Hyper-V is Microsoft's offering.