Viable to virtualize my laptop?

"The VM hosts I run are VMWare on top of a very minimal Debian install. I install Debian with next to nothing (not even selecting ""standard system"" during the install process), add a few tools and accessories that are useful for diagnostics later or that are handy to have at the console generally (psmisc, htop, vim, pv, 7zip, ...), add the libraries needed by VMWare, then install VMWare itself. That is as small as you'll get without hand rolling your own distro.

Unfortunately you have extra complications though: my setups like this are all server boxes with hardware that is known to be good for Linux compatibility. The base Linux setup may require more work on your laptop, for a start you will need to install and configure the relevant support for your wireless adaptor and such. If there is one of the operating systems that you are likely to use more than the others then I might suggest just using that as the host OS with VMWare workstation/server/player atop that for the other OSs - you could always minimise the host's footprint before starting a VM by shutting off services you won't on the host need while using the VMs (like local database servers for instance) - in either Linux or Windows this sort of thing should not be difficult to script."

"A stripped down linux is pretty lightweight. I virtualise XP, Vista and ubuntu on top of an Archlinux install on a centrino duo laptop bought in 2000, and the performance is more than adequate.

As Djago and David mention, you'll not easily get more lightweight than a stripped linux install."