virtualbox.org

Hello,

I'm new to Virtualbox and would like this forums opinion on our possible Small Business Virtual setup.

We have 10 VM's that are used daily in our Production environment. We've been using VMware Server v2 for the past few years without problems but I've been reading up on Virtualbox and I am impressed with the reviews I've seen.

We run the following types of VM's:
Windows 2008 Server with SQL 2005 Standard - 8 GB Ram
Windows 2003 Server with SQL 2005 Standard (backup of above SQL Server with log shipping) - 4 GB Ram
5 Ubuntu Server VM's totalling 3GB
3 Windows XP workstations totally 3 GB

We've been running our VM's in VMware Server v2 on 3 old Dell Servers but we are looking to refresh of our Servers and have found 1 Dell Poweredge 710's with the following Specs:
2 Intel Xeon CPU X5667 @ 3.07GHz
32 GB of RAM (Enough to run all our VM's as well as leave enough for the Host O/S and growth).
4 onboard Gigabit network cards
It will have 3 hardware Raid Array with a hotspare for each array. This is to accommodate our SQL Server VM's to ensure the Database, logs and temp db run on different spindles.
Raid 1 - SATA drives
Raid 10 - SAS 10,000 RPM
Raid 1 - SAS 10,000 RPM

All VM's would be running at the same time and would be set to autostart if the Host was rebooted.

Our VM's were built in VMware so I would have to test if these VM's could run properly in VirtualBox. Some VM's could be recreated as Net New in Virtualbox, but other VM's would not be able to be rebuilt yet so I would expect VirtualBox to run the vmdk's. I'll be testing these before moving forward of course.

I've been reading good reviews on Virtualbox performance. I know using a bare metal hypervisor like esxi or hyper-v would give us on the metal performance, but Virtualbox does give us the option to use less resources if we use Ubuntu Server as our Host O/S. What Host O/S to use is still up for debate for us since our onsite support for our small business has more windows experience. I can walk him through using Ubuntu Server but it is a concern if I'm not available that our onsite resource wouldn't feel comfortable with no Desktop and only a command line.

So what do you think...would this work for our small office? Would the specs of the Host Server be enough to run our VM's on Virtualbox or would we notice a considerable performance hit? Any tips or suggestions you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Disks:
SAS 10,000 RPM has astronomical price. To me it seems better get SSD or cheap 5400 or 7200 RPM HDD.
More distant future: HHD is the way to go (Hybrid Hard Drive combine SSD and HDD into single device).

CPU:
If 32 GB of RAM is OK for you, you can get standard Core i7 2600 CPU, which is faster than any Xeon + much cheaper.
(unless you absolutely need dual CPU or ECC RAM, but then again, a single Core i7 + SSD will do better)

Host OS:
Get whatever you like.
If Linux - I recommend Debian 6.0 instead, because I test it (as both host and guest), and publish test results, so certain level of quality is guaranteed.