If you haven't checked out VMWare then I strongly recommend it.  Their player is free for download and this lets you run as many 'appliances' as you want at any time on either a Windows or Linux host.  An appliance is basically an image that you load, be it a full Fedora Linux system, or a stripped down firewall, it all runs as if it was on its own hardware.

I have been using the Ubuntu and Fedora6 appliances for a wee while now and been very pleased with them.  Running them on a WindowsXP 2GB 3GHZ box has been nothing short of sweet.  The performance of both host and virtual machine very good with no noticeable slow down in either.  Both soundcard and network got picked up first time. That said, I wanted to get Fedora 5 up and running as this would then mirror exactly our production systems thus allowing me to do lots of wonderful testing.

One of the key things you need, if you are running under VMWare, is to have their vmware-tools installed on the virtualised operating system.  This provides for much greater control of the environment, for example, the ability to run the software in a higher resolution, or more importantly, the ability to move the mouse seemlessly between the virtual and host operating systems (otherwise you have to press CTRL+ALT to switch control of the mouse).

None of the Fedora's available at VMWare's directory had their own tools pre-installed, which is a bit strange.  After much fiddling and searching around, I found a great site called VM Advisor that came with the vmware tools all installed.  Downloaded their image, booted up the virtual machine and then ran % /usr/bin/vmware-tools-config.pl and then walked through the options.  This then installed all the necessary drivers, and after editing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf changing 'mouse' to 'vmmouse', everything burst into life.

One of the things I love about vmware, is the ability to simply close it down while its running; it saves the current state so when you load it up the next time, there is no reboot.  This feature doesn't work though if you move the image to another machine with a different chipset; for example a laptop running on an Intel Centrino; it reboots itself in that scenario.