I'd give Virtual Box the thumbs up too over VMWare. Have tried them
both and VBox is the one that's been the better one for me, and of
course VMWare isn't free but if it had been the better one I'd have
probably bought it. However, the version of Virtual Box in the
repositories doesn't have USB support so it's as well getting it
direct from VBox themselves - it's just a double click to install the
binary for Ubuntu

Like all virtual systems, it takes a little while getting used to how
they operate and share resources with the host OS. Not onerous, just a
case of working through it - and there's plenty of help around if it's
needed of course