I recommend this. Things are painful when development and production deviate - figuring out how to install a particular module or library becomes double the wo

I recommend this. Things are painful when development and production deviate - figuring out how to install a particular module or library becomes double the work, as does anything "low level", and you're always running the risk of doing something non-portable, which translates to a bug in deployment. All the other benefits of a VM, like snapshotting, certainly don't hurt. And if you do a server install of something like Ubuntu, your VM image shouldn't end up being more than a few gigs.