Fun fact: you can do that for Windows too. It also works fine... assuming you can even boot it. :-) You need to make sure Windows is booting from something it sees as disk rather than a partition (i.e. include an MBR or something before it). The main caveat is preventing the host from mounting the volume, otherwise the guest can't write to it. But I've managed to do this (yes it's painful) and it's great.
Pro tip: You can even make an immutable disk representing your entire disk and then boot the very same OS that is running VirtualBox from it. It's an awesome way to test changes you want to make to your system that you're unsure about.
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Fun fact: you can do that for Windows too. It also works fine... assuming you can even boot it. :-) You need to make sure Windows is booting from something it sees as disk rather than a partition (i.e. include an MBR or something before it). The main caveat is preventing the host from mounting the volume, otherwise the guest can't write to it. But I've managed to do this (yes it's painful) and it's great.
Pro tip: You can even make an immutable disk representing your entire disk and then boot the very same OS that is running VirtualBox from it. It's an awesome way to test changes you want to make to your system that you're unsure about.
Windows can also boot from a VHDX directly, which is pretty nice. (having a VM both as a VM and a boot option)
Yeah, though one issue with that is that expanding or shrinking it is so much more painful.