I'm with you on this, but there's no need to even do it with vmare. Development boxes don't get slammed like servers, you can throw CentOS or whatever on a headless "junk" PC you found while dumpster diving, and upload your code to it for testing/development.

Hell, that's what I do and my main Desktop does run Linux, but I devel on a junk machine running Apache/PHP, PostgreSQL.