First, even if its the answer you ruled out: get a machine with lots of RAM. Don't care about the rest, even an SSD is not that important, just cram as much of RAM into the machine as possible. 8GB would be good, 16 is better. Make sure that the OS has enough space to shuffle memory.
Use tiny VMs. Most development stacks do actually fit in 512MB, as long as there is nothing else running. Pay attention about which parts of your dev stack do actually consume the memory. In my case, it's mostly in-memory databases. Sample those for smaller datasets, its good practice anyways. If its still not enough, use odd values like 700MB. Rule memory leaks out (this is one of the big advantages of small VMs: memory leaks are easy to find).
Also, use one VM per project. Unless projects are tiny, putting 2 in one VM only replicates the problems of your host-system.
Finally, I also use VirtualBox with Vagrant and am quite okay with it.
This is what I'm thinking, I'm kinda spoiled at home with both my main box and my VM server each having 8 GB.
You do make a good point about the extra cruft that isn't needed for a VM. I should actually know this as I have several LEBs on the web and optimize them highly for low memory usage. I guess personal time < work time.
Use tiny VMs. Most development stacks do actually fit in 512MB, as long as there is nothing else running. Pay attention about which parts of your dev stack do actually consume the memory. In my case, it's mostly in-memory databases. Sample those for smaller datasets, its good practice anyways. If its still not enough, use odd values like 700MB. Rule memory leaks out (this is one of the big advantages of small VMs: memory leaks are easy to find).
Also, use one VM per project. Unless projects are tiny, putting 2 in one VM only replicates the problems of your host-system.
Finally, I also use VirtualBox with Vagrant and am quite okay with it.