Virtualisation is taking me ...
... to the shop to buy more memory.
Professionally there is some merit in running VMs (after all, IBM has made a mainframe business out of it). Although not as much as the marketing bumf says: most of the benefits can be achieved by consolidating workloads onto a single server, without the overheads, administration and duplication of multiple copies of the same old O/S.
Where it does win is with my old mum. She thinks her XP 'pooter is running native![1] In fact it's running as a Virtualbox guest on top of Ubuntu 8.04. This, and VNC, does make remote administration and support (a must with m.o.m-s the world over) much easier as I can access the system underneath XP whenever necessary to reboot it etc. All without having to go though the joys of getting a 70 year-old[2], 150 miles away, to press the right combination of keys, buttons and wotsits in the right order while holding the phone, too.
[1] actually she doesn't care what it is or what it runs on - just so long as it works.
[2] not that age is a driver, work provides the same opportunities with 20-60 y-o's as well.