I find myself wasting more and more time the last few years when I have to reinstall an OS and 20+ development tools and apps. I'm looking to do more work in virtual machines.
Now that you are starting to see 32GB and 64GB thumb drives. I was wondering can you run a Virtual PC or VMWare image from a USB Thumb drive? Any issues with doing this? I would plan on backing up the image daily just in case something happened to the drive.
Running a VM off a flash drive would have positively putrid performance. I guess you could copy the virtual hard drive to local storage first, though. I run my VMs off an external hard drive, myself.
I've never tried a thumb drive, but I use external USB drives for virtual machines all the time. I use VirtualPC 2007 and have had no problems. In fact, sometimes if the host machine is on the weaker side, having the VM on an external drive increases performance. I recommend the external USB drive route.
I suggest you invest in an external SSD to put those VMs on. Thumb drives are not known for speed.
This is entirely doable. Take a look at VMware Player -- To Go. Performance will be worse than an internal hard drive but not completely terrible. Jeff did a brief comparison.