Are there pre-built environments for Drupal development that includes all the right tools like drush, apache, phpmyadmin, etc.?
Only option I am able to find it Drupal QuickStart bit it does not look maintained at all as the last commit was 2 years ago.
I want to have my setup as a Virtual Machine so that I am never crippled by one machine going down and having to set everything up again.
I am primarily first looking at environments for Drupal 7 but also would like it to work with Drupal 8, for when I make the move.
My Research shows the following options so far, would love to get any more options
VM for Drupal 8 Looks like for drupal 8 only and not sure how this works.
Vagrant Drupal Development - This looks like the most promising. Anyone have experience with this?
PS: I hope this question is not deemed too broad. I have tried to do the research and provide options to keep the discussion very focussed.
If you're just looking for a simple dev environment, get Acquia Dev Desktop 2 from Acquia (Dries created the company). It's free and basically creates what you need in a "standalone" application. Find it here: https://www.acquia.com/downloads.
I've used the Mac version, and it works fairly well.
Creating a VM via Vargrant and Chef is a great way to go (basically VDD, the third option you put out above), but it requires a bit more of an understanding of server administration with some sort of Linux distribution, so the learning curve is a bit steeper. If you're looking to replicate your production server environment on your Desktop, then you can basically clone the server and have it run locally, but, again, most people don't need an exact duplicate for basic development.