A smart way to go, IMHO, I'll second that philosophy.

I have my most powerful machine running 7.10, a lesser machine running
XP, and two even older ones running 6.06, and Centos 4 (a Red Hat
Clone). I have the first three on a KVM switch, the last one on its
own monitor and keyboard. My laptop dual-boots Linux and Windows, and
is never hooked to the KVM switch.

The 6.06 machine is a backup server with a large external disk, and
the Centos machine is used by my wife, almost exclusivley for web
browsing.

I run vmware on the primary Linux machine as well, but use it mostly
to experiment with new Linux distros.