CAD VMs

Oh, but make sure you configure all software in the VM to use a "network drive" (at least not C: locations) for all of the important files. Then your VM's virtual disk is not storing your data, so that can be kept on the Linux host, or better still some RAID-based NAS that is backed up properly, etc.

VMware has an option to mount host folders as 'network drives' but it sucks (becomes disabled for no obvious reason, unable to cope with case sensitivity/unsensitivity), so if you can use a NAS with CIFS export, or run samba on the Linux host to do network drives properly.

Not sure about VirtualBox, etc, but they are probably similar.