[falcolas]

I agree with this. Having the same environment in production as you have in dev will help avoid a lot of integration issues and specialized configurations which you have to maintain. I've had many production issues pop up in the past which were solely due to assuming things in production were similar to my development box.

Plus, many of the available database installs are much more fragile (and use older versions) on my Mac than they are on a VM.

The only time I see local development working particularly well is for front end development, where the part that matters is in the browser, not the server.