I do CD ripping from within a VM. I've successfully done it with both VMWare and VirtualBox under Windows Vista, Windows 7 and OSX hosts (my ripping guest is a bare bones WinXP install).

Do make it work, you have to tell the VM software to operate the virtual drive in pass thru mode, rather than emulating a drive. I did have some messing about at some points to get it working.

I don't know wether it is as straight forward with DVD ripping.