virtualbox.org

I'm running Virtual Box x64 on Vista 64 and was wondering what would be the best choice for a guest linux OS. I've run ESXi, and many other virutalization packages at work but those were all out of the box so to speak, so tinkering was out of the question (on production machines). Would Gentoo be a good choice? I've had linux mint xfce running with the tools installed but wasn't satisfied with its performance. I was also considering Debian's net install to make it as light as possible since this is my laptop and I'm only going to be using it for some web browsing and light coding.

I suspected as much, I completely forgot to throw my machine's specs out there.

Core 2 Duo t5600
4gb ram
945gm chipset

I had a dual boot setup running but grew quickly tired of rebooting every time I wanted to work with my *nix installs.

Then it's still what you prefer. I prefer Ubuntu for example, does that make it the best choice? Someone else really likes OpenSuSE, is that the best distro? If you're confortable with compiling everything from source, you can use Gentoo. It's really what you like.

Preference would dictate that I use ubuntu or another debian based install, but from experience they don't run as well as I'd like under a virtualized environment but I guess the question that I come back to is, will I see a true increase in performance using a distro that I compile from source.

ubuntu or another debian based install, but from experience they don't run as well as I'd like under a virtualized environment

my eperiences based on a 2GHz P4 debian lenny host: booting Ubuntu 6.06 takes about twice as long as 8.04 - and debian etch, lenny (stock kernel) maybe a little bit faster than 8.04 (but my debian guests run stripped down gnome environment w/o much themes engines). Kernels with necessary drivers already compiled into (no initrd) boot my debian guests even somewhat faster than stock initrd kernel.

anyway, when up and running i hardly feel any perfomance difference between Ubuntu 6.06 and stripped down debian with self compiled kernel

My experience: some tests.
Hardware host: dual Intel Xeon 3,06 Ghz 533FSB with 6GB ram, software raid1 2TB Hd (No VT-x).
Software host: ubuntu 12.10 server with xcfe gui.
I tried 4 guests: Xubuntu 12.10 desktop (and also without X environnement), CentOs 6.5 minimal server (only shell), Debian 7.4 CD1 (only shell), Windows Xp SP3 (only OS installed).
I need only a Linux distro with LAMP running a php-based administrative software, with web management interface.
Xubuntu 12.10 and Centos are almost the same: a lot of time to boot (10 or more minutes) and about 4sec to move from a web page to another of management gui.
Virtualbox addons doesn't make any difference.
Debian 7.4 takes only 2:30 mins to boot and surfing time of web-php pages is about 2 seconds, so it works lot better.
Windows Xp with all its standard graphic effects? Yes, only 25 seconds to boot and realtime response of grafical inferface! It requires less time to boot in virtualbox machine then in real hardware!
I tested the same also in a Windows 7 Core I5 Host environnemet (with VT-x): the three linux here are almost the same, with time reduced to les than 1 minute to boot and realtime web server surfing;
Windows Xp SP3 as guest here takes only 17 seconds to boot: not a great enhancement, really?
So, in my experience, linux is very resource-hungry, and php server uses lot of cpu, and it doesn't use well virtual machine resources; there is something like instruction multiple translation that litterally kills the cpu, and really needs VT-x support to work.
Windows, contrary, works very smooth and uses virtual machine cpu better: it works almost better as a virtualbox guest than on a direct similar hardware (P4 3Ghz, for example).
In a real hardware environnement linux and windows xp are much more similars in time required.
If you plan to use linux server ad host: choose debian, or require VT-x!