Yeah, you can integrate them with CI/CD tools such as GitLab, Jenkins, Team City, things like that. But overall the environments are separate entities. With containers it gets a bit more interesting, and technically you can “ship” the same container through dev → QA → staging → production (a lot of companies are doing this).
If you’re just learning the development part right now, it’s best to stay on the single workstation with your workflow, get it working, then move to understanding how continuous delivery, automated deployments, A/B or Blue/Green deployments work.
For sure, it takes practice to get familiar with it all.
VMware Workstation is great, as is Hyper-V and VirutalBox. Docker is awesome, too, but functions differently than a traditional virtual machine.