I have been using machine virtualization for many years now an I have got to say since the relative affordability of powerful CPUs and Hardware, performance is now very acceptable, even on my Tablet PC! Suddenly after the IPO of VMWare everyone wants in on the action! So far the big players are VMWare, Microsoft, Parallels, Oracle (new) and several Open Source versions. For me I have been flip flopping between VMWare and Microsoft. If I had a Mac I would probably be looking at VMWare Fusion and Parallels. So I just wanted to share some of my thoughts on performance when it comes to machine virtualization. There are a few areas that you need to be concerned with 32bit or 64bit Host Operating System Multiple CPUs Lots of RAM (Most new consumer boards support up to 8GB) Fast hard disks 7.2K to 10K or RAID 0, 1, 0+1 External drive enclosures Backup If I had a choice I would probably dedicate a machine to host all my virtual machines but I would be wasting a machine and also...