I run all of my production services in simple *nix chroots. It's fairly simple to rsync these onto my dev machines to get the hi-fi local versions for testing.

I run all of my production services in simple *nix chroots. It's fairly simple to rsync these onto my dev machines to get the hi-fi local versions for testing. The only proviso is that you use similar environments, so in my case Ubuntu, for both production and development.