Well if you want to do something with VMware I suggest you to look at Homestead. Homestead is provided by Laravel and gives you a complete development environment on Ubuntu. Check out the docs: https://laravel.com/docs/5.2/homestead
Now the difference between cPanel and digital ocean is that digital ocean is just a clean VPS. It's just a server. You need to install your own stack, which is suited for your projects. You can find a lot tutorials on how to do this. However if you find this really difficult, Laravel has you covered. Laravel introduced Laravel Forge. This is an admin panel that can work with your digital ocean server. From that panel you can deploy your sites from any git repository. Check out forge: https://forge.laravel.com/