What is the best way to boot from a virtual disk (image file)
This question might edge on being an IT question, so please bear with me.

I use a strong PC to run multiple emulated machines (using qemu) in a virtual network as my building and testing grounds to develop a multi-component network oriented software system.

Sometimes, I would like to boot the whole PC into one of the images, for example to further test one of the successful builds. One way would be to have each image in an actual harddisk partition and a GRUB entry for each, but is there a more elegant solution?

Note that in this scenario I would always run only one image at a time, so it's not *really* about virtualization.
What is the best way to boot from a virtual disk (image file)
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This question might edge on being an IT question, so please bear with me.

I use a strong PC to run multiple emulated machines (using qemu) in a virtual network as my building and testing grounds to develop a multi-component network oriented software system.

Sometimes, I would like to boot the whole PC into one of the images, for example to further test one of the successful builds. One way would be to have each image in an actual harddisk partition and a GRUB entry for each, but is there a more elegant solution?

Note that in this scenario I would always run only one image at a time, so it's not *really* about virtualization.