I have experience with both VMWare and VirtualBox hosting Linux on Windows (Android development). I've always wanted to give this a try the other way around (but wasn't eager for the cost of another Windows license).
A Windows-7 Customer Preview of the release candidate is available this month, so I gave it a try. The good news is it's to be active thru May of 2010.
I got VirtualBox 3.0.0 first for Ubuntu 9.04, following the instructions for adding it to the sources list. I added the source list, apt-get update and then searched for the virtualbox-3 version the site spoke of.
My Ubuntu installation is a 32 bit (even though my hardware is 64 bit), so I installed the 32-bit version of VirtualBox, as well as a 32 bit version of Windows-7. After installing VirtualBox, a reboot showed it in the Applications->System Tools menu.
Registration worked, I made a new Windows-7 "disk", allocating 1024M RAM to it, and then added the Windows-7 installation CD iso image to this "machine." I was now ready to "boot" this virtual instance. Windows installation worked fine. Next step was to reboot and update windows. On my setup (at least) the cursor-capture (right control) key doesn't seem to get passed back to VirtualBox once Windows-7 is running (it will before windows boot has completed, it seems), so a priority was to install the Virtual Box Guest additions from the Devices Menu. Installing this CD image showed it mounted on Windows (from the Start menu, Computer). I ran theVboxGuestAdditions-x86 version, rebooted Windows and now my mouse was no longer captive.
UPDATE: Note that for the VBoxGuestAdditions to correctly install on Windows-7, you need to boot Windows-7 in "safe" mode: press F8 at boot to get a menu giving you the option. Otherwise, Windows will not allow some of the files to be installed.
Browser, network, updates, sound, etc. all worked.
On Fedora-11 x86_64, again things are a little more complicated.
From www.virtualbox.org I installed the Fedora-11 64 bit version (an RPM file), and downloaded the 64 bit version of Windows-7 Preview (the release candidate). Reboot of Fedora-11, and VirtualBox appeared on my Applications->System Tools menu, but wouldn't boot (critical error). Firing it up from a shell (VirtualBox) showed a permissions problem on startup. On Fedora-11 the first userid is 500; on Ubuntu it's 1000. Since I have a dual-boot setup, and since I share the source (and document) areas, I changed my userid under Fedora. VirtualBox makes an IO directory, /tmp/.vbox - BUT incredibly it does not create it with the current invoking user's ID, but with (!) 500. Chown (with group = vboxuser) of this directory solved my startup problem (good). Unfortunately I'll have to do this each time I boot Fedora (it's tmp! I've reported this). Once running, installing Windows-7 preview worked fine; I followed the same procedures as for Ubuntu. On the Fedora Vbox, I could not get sound to work - whatever combination of vbox settings I used, Windows-7 did not see an audio device under the 64-bit setup & Fedora.
Other than that, browsing, windows update, playing videos (youtube, etc.), songs, all the fundamentals seem solid. On the 64 bit side, Adobe's Flash player didn't seem to be able to load automatically in Win-7 - I had to manually select a 64 bit windows (Vista) option for the browser install, and then it worked. Performance on both seems pretty darn good.
Another way to test web applications. I've built Google Chrome for Linux, but it's still in Alpha. Now I have Chrome, Firefix, Safari, IE8, and Opera running under windows.
As I fire these up, and try to make some links, I'm seeing the control key in VirtualBox 3 doesn't seem to come thru to the applications in the guest, e.g. CTRL-C / CTRL-V to copy / paste don't seem to work at all (I have to right-click COPY / right-click PASTE). Checking this with copy/paste attempt from within wordpad confirms; only the 'c' of a CTRL-c keypress makes it through; menu pasting pastes something from the paste buffer from before (outside windows).
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