I'm running MongoDB in a virtualized Linux environment. In this situation, I have multiple physical disks that I can use for the database. However, I'd rather not manage a RAID (mostly because I have little to no experience with RAIDs.)
I'm also reluctant to use LVM because I want to minimize the impact of a drive failure should one occur.
Is there a way to configure MongoDB to use multiple physical disks?
Not the answer you're looking for, but I'd reconsider the RAID. If you want to minimize the impact of a drive failure the standard protection is RAID.
It's not all that bad to learn, and quite frankly trying to come up with a workaround to avoid something rather commonly used will probably come back to bite you down the road. At least that's my experience.
Properly configured RAID would be invisible to your applications and take little maintenance up until drive failure, and after a drive failure recovery is minimal impact. If you don't want to play with software RAID, get a hardware card; the maintenance and configuration is usually even simpler to deal with and if this is a production environment for an important system it's probably a better idea to get hardware RAID.
How does your virtual Linux environment have access to physical disks? Is it using some sort of pass-through? Traditionally, virtualised environments use disk files, that sit on already-redundant disk hardware, so your VM doesn't have to worry about it. If hardware RAID is not in place in your virtualisation host, I'd say you missed a trick.
If you are using pass-through disks, or you have configured multiple disk files, and are worried about the integrity of these, I'd just bite the bullet and go for MDRAID. There's a decent-enough tutorial (for Ubuntu, but it is mostly the same on other distros) at http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-set-up-software-raid1-on-a-running-system-incl-grub2-configuration-ubuntu-10.04.