This is a large project and currently there are only 3 developers working on it. We have some money in the budget to contract development help from a software consulting firm. However, because the location of our business it would be beneficial if the consultant could do their development off-site. Also, our company policy doesn't allow contract help to VPN into our network, so that is not an option.

My question is, would it be a good idea to create a Virtual Machine that copies our internal environment (particularly our database and WCF service) and give the consultant the Virtual Machine image so that they can replicate the environment at their place of work?

I haven't worked much with Virtual Machines, so I'm not sure if this is a good idea or if there are huge obstacles that I'm not thinking of.

If anyone has ever done anything like this, it would be great to hear the pros/cons. Any help would be appreciated.