If you are in a company that does not allow it, at least get them to install VirtualBox or some other virtualisation program. (Or quit. But I understand real life is made of compromises.)
Buuuuut iiiiittttsss sssoooooooo ssssllloooooooowwww. Seriously- we have root on box, but thought we'd be smart by doing OS X and just use VMWare Fusion for Win and Linux emu. VMWare is awesome to have available, but they would have easily saved money by buying us an additional box or two to run Windows for the IE testing. Anything that slows a developer down is wasting not only the time they lost waiting, but in flow interrupt and the morale and excitement level dropping. Also, even better would have been to additionally hire some resource(s) to focus on CI and QA, and maybe the QA resource could have worried about IE. ;) j/k
At my previous job I had a 4 core Intel processor + 4GB RAM. Ubuntu as host and I regularly ran 3 guest Windows instances at once without any slowdowns. I guess it depends on how you do things: the host OS only really ran a terminal emulator + vim. Maybe it would have been different if I had a GUI IDE...
I generally find the quality of multiprocessing in the guest OS is not good; nor is accelerated graphics. Most VMs are ok if all you need is single proc non visual performance, though.
An SSD + 4 cores made the difference for me to finally move my Linux "box" into a VM and not look back. But again, I'm also just doing terminals, vim, and Chrome.
I have an SSD, 8 cores, 12 GB RAM etc., but trying to get processes in the guest OS to scale across multiple cores is very much an uphill battle. VMWare's dual-core emulation was actually worse than single processor for my uses cases.
