The myChEMBL virtual machine comes with a number of python modules already installed, which means in most cases things will work just fine. In case additional modules are needed, virtualenv allows to experiment with different combinations and versions of python on one single instance of the myChEMBL VM. In this gist, I specify the steps necessary to set up virtualenv on the myChEMBL VM.
The first step is to install the python package manager pip. This can be done using easy_install, a more basic package manager for python. It is already installed on myChEMBL but in case it still needs to be installed, this can easily be done using
sudo apt-get install python-setuptools python-dev build-essential
So once that is sorted we can install pip with the command