In a recent post to his blog Brian Swan shows you how to use the Storage Emulator for Azure with PHP via their provided SDK. It's a quick post but it has a helpful code snippet if you've been struggling with getting it set up.

This is a short post to address this question: How do I use the local Storage Emulator (formerly known as Development Storage) when using the Windows Azure SDK for PHP? The Windows Azure Command Line Tools for PHP provide an option for running an application locally in the Compute Emulator, but I didn't see an option for using the local Storage Emulator. As it turns out, the answer is very simple, although somewhat difficult to find.

The trick is to omit the constructor parameters when creating a new table/blob/client to get it to create things locally instead of on your Azure instance. He also includes a set of links that can help fill in some of the gaps in the whole Windows Azure deployment process.