content: VMs are considerably more mobile - they can be resized easily and you can easily allocate resources to and from them. This, to me, is a huge advantage because I do not need to wipe anything whatsoever in order to switch around my windows box if something goes wrong. As somebody who's dual booted often, not having to sacrifice other partitions to change the Windows partition is a huge benefit.   This also gives the advantage of being able to run both at once, meaning I can game on one of my monitors when I can have Pidgin or Firefox or anything else on the right. I don't have to put anything on my windows VM but games, and I can keep my Linux machine running otherwise. It's a very clean separation, and I never have to sigh and reboot when something is on one OS but not the other.  EDIT: One last thing, and a huge draw for me. If you have a huge graphics card - one that takes up a ton of power and/or acts like a heater, having that thing ONLY on when you're running the VM saves some power and heat. I have an AMD R9 290x and it is similar to a space heater. Having that thing off when I'm not running the VM helps the temperature.