I am currently attempting to get our development environment as close as possible to production with a minimum of cost. Steps we have take so far is to virtualize our production servers, we have also started the migration from windows 2003 to linux.  A major factor here was the difficulty involved in cloneing a windows based machines.

Having a virtualized environment allows us to download the production servers reduce the memory in the VMs to suit and the run the same servers as development machines.

The next step was deciding on the best way to connect to these development machines for coding. I decided to experiment with SSHFS and it;s working out very nicely so far.

We use subversion for code management and one gotcha was to specify the sshfs options  allow_other and workaround=rename.  Without the rename option subversion would throw an error when trying to work with the files. The command we used for mounting look something like this:

sshfs marcel@192.168.1.11:/var/cfml /home/marcel/mount/bd1/ -p 22 -o allow_other,workaround=rename