Much like Michael I also use virtual-box, but I would add that depending on your circumstances you may need the PUEL edition. This is not open source, but it is still free (as in beer) for personal use. The main feature it has that the open source edition does not is that it can share USB devices between the host and virtual computers.
If you decide you need the PUEL edition it is available as a .deb from the virtualbox website. A little further tweaking is needed to get the USb sharing working, there is a guide here. Note that the final step (something like chown root:vboxusers /dev/vboxdrv) is not actually needed (I didn't do it and it still works for me).
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