I have a situation where my work computer has Outlook+Lotus Notes with draconian protection. Unfortunately this means that Eclipse development (meaning zillions of small files) gets very slow.

I now have a situation where I have been allowed to migrate the Outlook+Notes stuff in a virtual machine so the rest of the host OS can be used for development at a more leisurely protection level.

I have good experience with vmware workstation under XP and vmware Fusion, some with VirtualBox (the latest had network issues under OS X).

I was expecting either to put OpenSolaris (for dtracing java, no a Mac is not an option) or Ubuntu as the host OS.

My primary wish is to have both host and guest being able to use the laptop + external screen as effortless as in native XP, hence the need to ask for experiences :)

Does anybody have good or bad experiences to tell? Please make an answer pr vm/os combination to allow for acceptance when I've decided.