When I last looked into this, the only means to do this was to use QEMU's arm emulators. For me, it requires much patience to get the hang of the basics. However, unless something new has been released, the main issue is that QEMU only emulates the ARMv7 processor itself, not the rest of the RPi2 (ie. GPIO, etc).
I also just found this post Raspberry Pi Emulation for Windows with QEMU which is fairly recent. We may be able to take some/most/all ideas from that and get a bit further.
I'm still fairly certain that the main issue is the emulation of the RPi2 hardware, or at least those parts unique to the RPi2.
I haven't looked at this for awhile, having simply moved to having a stack of RPi's and SDHC cards at hand. And several Linux variant VM's I build via Packer and Vagrant (ie. Arch, Debian, etc) which have qemu-static-arm to build custom *.img files in. At that level I'm only using QEMU to run the Linux binaries to, say update repos, install packages, etc. (It's functional, but still a bit rough around the edges at the moment.)