TheSteven
 
I've been considering doing something similar but slightly more drastic - also putting my DAWs in a virtual machine.
So only having the base operating system on the machine and everything on separate virtual machines - one for my DAWs, one for my programming apps, one for 'normal' PC usage (email, etc.).
 
In the past 2 years for reasons beyond my control (motherboard failure, OS corruption, etc) I've had to 3 times setup & reconfigure my system from scratch.  My audio setup takes the most time. Each time it's a long drawn out process of getting everything installed, activated and configured.
I haven't run a proof of concept yet (putting Sonar on a virtual machine and checking it out) but hoping that on a decent i7 processor, with ample RAM and SSDs that it proves viable.

I don't think that hardware virtualization has reached a point yet to allow real-time audio in a virtual machine (Guest OS).
 
A DAW and related hardware for audio/MIDI will still need to be installed on the base (Host OS) operating system.  I have VirtualBox installed on my PC and the only audio driver available in there is Windows DirectSound, even though my host system has a FireWire ASIO interface.  I can get media players and YouTube to work fine, but would expect horrible latency for any serious audio work.
 
It's a good idea though, and I hope they make it happen soon.  But I think we are lucky to have the current VM desktop interface support at this point given that the majority of VM users are running servers (headless/no GUI).  Probably not enough demand to make it a high priority for the devs.

abacab
 
I don't think that hardware virtualization has reached a point yet to allow real-time audio in a virtual machine (Guest OS).
 

I totally agree.. I can't even get regular audio through my sound card to work correctly in a virtual, at least with virtualbox. It plays, then starts distorting and gets really bad, then clears up, then back to distorted. It's unusable.  I don't think it has to do with hardware performance as much as it has to do with the virtualbox software. 
 
I've surfed around on their forums a few times to see if anyone else has this problem and/or if there are any solutions and I see nothing. I've tried multiple different configurations, I either get no audio at all or the alternating clear/distorted sound. 
 
I'm sure it would be better if I had full vmware or something but I'm not betting I could have a fully functional DAW. 
 
But, if it would work, I would be all for it!!
 
gabo
 
PS - Another thing that is incredible to use are the portable apps.. portableapps.com. They are awesome!! Lots of windows apps for everything from office to picture editing to email and browsers. They all run from a directory, even on a thumb drive with no installation, no entries in the registry, nothing. Perfect for keeping a DAW pristine, and backing any of them up is just a matter of copying the directory somewhere else. They are all self contained! It's easily on my top 5 list of coolest things!!

I'll be using VMWare Workstation and last time I tried it with Vista (around a decade ago?) - it worked.  I only did a simple test with a couple of audio tracks & VSTs but the playback was OK.
I should be able to open my USB ports so that the virtual machine can see my Quad-Capture and iLok but haven't tried that yet.  The question is under real world usage (tracking or mixing a full production using lots of plugins) - will it choke?
 
Unfortunately I've got no time to test it this month, too many irons in the fire.