This sounds very much like a test environment, where you can try out a lot of different things without totally screwing up you primary use (virtual) machine. As far as sandboxes go, this seems like a very reasonable way to do it. For most users, I think vmware is going a bit far, but it sounds like you have soma valid reasons for going to that extreme.

I’ve not sure it’s necessary to have raid 1. While it will protect you against a single drive failure, as you point out, there are a lot of other reasons why you need actual backups. Adding raid to the configuration may unnecessarily complicate things. I’m all for raid in a server environment, but it may be overkill here.

The other thing that may be more difficult than anticipated is access to hardware devices. As a Windows user, I’ve grown accustomed to having fairly easy access to my hardware. Using the sound card for audio conferencing is easy. When I plug in a USB device, Windows usually recognizes it and just makes it work. I’d predict that the extra layer of abstraction provided by the virtual machine may make this kind of thing more difficult.

I’m interested to hear how it goes.