Creating virtualized development environments allows you to form encapsulated environments for specific projects that can have the same exact versions of operating systems, PHP, web servers, databases, libraries, settings, etc. as the real thing. These environments keep everything isolated from each other and can easily be destroyed and recreated as needed. This provides a number of benefits:
Ability to run multiple projects on various PHP versions to match their production versions without trying to run them on your development machine.
No chance of messing anything up ...
