Hyper-V for Developers

Windows 8 Pro comes with Hyper-V feature.
With sufficient hardware, it is now possible to develop and test
distributed systems on a single dev box.
Virtual machines can be managed by PowerShell scripts.

In this detailed article, a 16 GB RAM/ 2x128 GB SSD laptop
was able to run 11 VMs...

Hyper-V for Developers Part 1 - Ken Kilty's Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs