I doubt strong that it is capable of emulating a virtual machine

Will you provide a virtual machine for our computers software to use or will we install software manually? My computer is not very powerful, I doubt strong that it is capable of emulating a virtual machine and I'm not alone in this case.

The VM we configure are light (<512 Mb)... You will need to optmize your code to make the VM be light. So VM can pass on a normal computer.
You can use the more powerful computer of your team as the test machine. Or you can bring a server that you borrow.
Moreover, you can also a computer as a server (no need obligatory to have a VM)

Note : If you really need it, you can create a Virtual Machine quite similar to the "real" one by using either VMWare Workstation (http://www.vmware.com/fr/products/workstation, or Oracle VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/)
Then you setup a Virtual Machine with 512 MB of RAM and 1,4 GB of disk, and you boot a Debian NetInst (http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/7.7.0/amd64/iso-cd/debian-7.7.0-amd64-netinst.iso) and install SSH, Apache2.

It will use about this amount of ressources ( 512 MB of RAM and 1,4 GB of disk) on your computer. It worked on my personnal, 4 years old, netbook.