Ok so I'm building a multi-OS workstation right (some of you may already know of it's madness but just bear with me) and I'm wondering if the Virtualized OSes are each on their own partition of the HDD's or if they're shared across a single partition.

The answer depends, you can have the OS images resides each on their own partition, however generally speaking the omage is contained in one or more files, and you can look at the "hard drive" as just some binary files residing in the virtualization's folder.

Before doing anything, I would definately suggest reading up on the admin/installation/etc notes before starting.

Hm... well I've been looking around for some time now and I've found that according to many sites the problem with virtualizing OSes is that you lose performance. I'm doing a tri OS system with Linux, Vista, and OS X. I know, it sounds like insanity but I have apps that will only run on Vista and apps that will only run on OS X and I need linux because I find it easier to work with the partitions via Ubuntu x64. I haven't found much but would Virtual PC have an upgrade or a patch for OS X? Like I said I've looked around but I've only found rumors and stuff about OS X.

Thanks for the help and responses!

I have loaded various OS's on my home machine (in sig) which is beefy to say the least. I am able to run them at an acceptable speed, but there is some slight slowdown. Note that I say this with the graphical enhancements to XP still turned on; with them off the thing is full-speed (roughly).

As for OS X, that is a sticky situation. Let me just say that it is indeed possible to run OS X after downloading ILLEGAL copies which have had the copy protection scheme and machine limiting scheme broken or downloading an already installed image which is ALSO ILLEGAL. If you wish to pursue that, you'll have to do your own research and proceed at your own volition. Apple has the last word on whether or not they intend to release their software to be run on any platform other than their licensed hardware, and until that time it is not guarenteed to work. Period.

That being said, if you can and do legally purchase OS X for x86 machines and use a virtualization mechanism that supports it (currently none do at a resonable speed, but QEMU lists it as slated for the next release, no word from vmWare)

Thanks. I've looked into the pirated version of OS X but I'm not really a fan of that, only anime on bittorrent. Hm... well I hope that they'll release OS X to run on my x86 machine or I'll have a crapload of software that I won't be able to use.