That kinda stuff runs well in a VM. Not too GPU dependent, so you generally get very-near-native performance. The only problem I end up having is constantly blowing away my VMs, racking up too many new installs, and running afoul of key limits.
Have you seen qubes os? [1] Obviously this would not work on OS X, but the concept is fascinating and definitely a different and unique approach at security and isolation.
Qubes is great but be careful... I tried giving a specific usb port to a windows vm to play games with a joystick and accidentally gave all of my USB inputs to it, effectively locking myself out of dom0. Oops.
I wanted to try running in a VM and actually have not considered believing bad performance. How is performance degradation - is it very very noticeable?
With the virtualization primitives in modern CPUs it's like 95%+ of native. GPUs are a total lost cause though, so you won't be playing games (unless you do GPU passthrough).
