This isn't a server question per se,
but I wonder if I can have my operating system be, more or less, a VM. Right now, I have Windows XP, and run linux (most of the time) in VMware. I would just switch to linux, but I like being able to switch back and forth, and I need Windows for a lot of things.
I guess I could just run Windows in the VM, but that would basically just be the same thing, in reverse. What I would really like to do is to have both of them (and maybe moar in the future) in a virtual machine, and never use the host OS. Of course, as it is now, Windows is using a lot of its own resources--and the virtual hard drive is on the same hard drive as Windows, so everything is just... Slow and muddy. It'd be nice to have a really quick OS that only runs the VM, and doesn't do anything else but provide virtualization for the other operating systems. It would make dual booting incredibly easy, as well as installing new operating systems, and the like. Plus you could quick-switch between two or three different environments, or boot one while you use the other, etc.
Is there an OS suitable for this task? Is there a VM suitable for this task? I mean, it'd be nice if the host didn't have to load up it's whole graphical environment and could just load the VM into a command-line sort of interface... Can this be done with existing (preferably free) software?