I'm a developer who must rely on Windows for various programs that simply don't run in Linux. My first thought is to run Ubuntu within some sort of virtual machine, such as Vbox. However, my primary drive is an SSD (Samsung 470/256gb), and I've heard that it is a bad idea for your SSD to run VM's on it (I guess it decreases its longevity substantially, due to the nature of write methodology or something?). For what I want to do, dual boot would not be realistic, since I basically just want Ubuntu running in the background, mostly, and to shell into it when I need to do stuff.
I like Ubuntu specifically, because that's what we use on our production server; this would allow me a dev environment local to my machine (this probably . I realize this is probably a stupid question - after all, how could two OS's share the same physical resources? Googling wasn't very helpful, but maybe there is some sort of software or methodology I'm not thinking to search for. Thoughts? Suggestions? I suppose another take could be some solution that makes virtualization on SSD's safe?