I will have it running on bare metal where I can. The 860 is my gaming rig, though. And just as I suspected... TPF with vmware on a 6901 is about 33 minutes, down from 44 min on 6900 using the Windows client - about a 50% improvement in PPD.
How much memory have you on your 860? Last year when bigadv folding was just in Linux, 6gb mem was needed, is it still the case?