This reminds me of facebook development, where you need to have a live fqdn for all of your environments. We used to use a staging server and had a similar prob

This reminds me of facebook development, where you need to have a live fqdn for all of your environments. We used to use a staging server and had a similar problem with huge amounts of small unnatural commits for things you would normally test locally. I ended up moving to using ssh tunnels to a server, where each dev has a subdomain redirecting to their dev box through the tunnel. This has the added benefit that you can work locally from anywhere you have wifi. Whether you use tunnels or VMs, both are a solid way to do development.