I've done it with Hyper-V.
The result will be that your storage latency will drop to near zero, which will very much accelerate your scenario. Your total CPU usage will increase some, as the CPUs will be copying data around RAM, rather than telling a storage controller to do DMA.
It's not clear to me from your description whether you intend to clean-install the OS as part of your test or whether the OS can be pre-installed on the virtual hard disk. This will greatly affect the speed of the test, as the Hyper-V storage drivers won't be installed in Server 2003 until late in OS installation.
As a final note, Hyper-V will need a little bit more RAM. So you'll have to use sparse disks that don't actually eat up 20GB. I suspect your test will run even faster if you give Server 2003 another 1GB, too.
