There is one thing about installing a new operating system which really sucks: fine-tuning the installation - which usually takes a lot more time than the installation itself. So I spent almost the entire weekend doing post-installation stuff and in the end, I installed everything three times before I was really satisfied with the result.
The first thing to consider was whether to use physical partitions or virtual disk images in VMware - I couldn't find much information about this on Google except that using physical partitions was considered an "expert" option. The only real advantage of using raw partition seems to be increased performance, but you can't take any snapshots of your VM with this option. I still decided to use them because disk space isn't really a problem for me anymore, I can easily use traditional Windows backup to backup the entire system to an unused hard disk partition, but getting maximum performance is very important for me.
Another important thing to decide was the amount of RAM to allocate to the VMs - the host has 4 GB, so I had the idea of running two VMs at the same time. After trying several options between 1-2 GB, I finally realized that my laptop isn't powerful enough to handle this, each time I tried the machine started swapping like hell and it took over an hour till I could do anything useful again (I didn't want to risk damaging the installation by doing a force shutdown, so I had to wait till it was done booting and let me shutdown cleanly). Now I'm allocating 2 GB to the VM, which means that both host and VM can run without any swapping.
Most of the work was fixing all these tiny but annoying little issues that came up while installing this stuff.
Last thing I had to do last night was running a backup of both installations.