I don’t have any experience with your specific configuration so I can only offer some general advice. But obviously the closer a development/test environment is to the production environment the better. Saves a lot of headache in the long run.
If your production environment is already configured and live I’d do everything possible to duplicate that in your new development environment. Of course you’ll either want different host names (dev.example.com versus www.example.com) or will have to use your hosts file to ‘trick’ your machine in to going to the new dev envrionment. It’s basically the same thing that you’re doing now, only WordPress isn’t on your local machine.