Acho que um bom ponto de vista será dar uma olhada no COSMOS :
Cosmos is an operating system "construction kit", built from the ground up around the IL2CPU compiler in C# ...
Desenvolva seu próprio sistema operacional em C # ou VB.NET
This is your operating system running in VMWare Player! Cosmos can of course also be booted in VMWare Workstation, Hyper-V, Virtual PC, or on real hardware. But by default, Cosmos uses VMWare Player because it is both free, and reliable. Cosmos can even debug in Visual Studio, even when running on another machine.