I used virtual box before to test OS installation on my own personal computer. I'm not sure if it's suitable for actual virtualization on live servers. I mostly hear about Xen for that. Is virtualbox at the same level (production environment virtualization)? and what other alternatives are there, other than Xen?
Linux – Is virtualbox good for live server virtualization
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Best Answer
One notable thing that I feel has been left out is that VirtualBox is an entirely different class of virtualization. VirtualBox falls under the category of "workstation virtualization" (also known as Desktop virtualization) which is fine and dandy, but it doesn't really compare to Microsoft's Hyper-V or VMWare's ESXi.
Hyper-V, ESXi, KVM, and Xen are all hypervisors - they are tiny OS's that do one thing: run VMs. You don't really interact with them after setting them up. (You can, and should regularly, but it is not the primary machine you interact with. Just make sure it's updated, etc.)
VirtualBox is much more similar to VMWare Server or Microsoft's Virtual PC. That is not to say you can't do anything within VirtualBox that you can't do in, say, Xen, but it's not the goal.
Given all that, though, I would personally not recommend VirtualBox for a production environment - not a lot of trust there, since you have to run a full OS below it (rather than the slimmed down, small footprint hypervisors mentioned earlier). I do love it, though, for testing a server on my workstation and then deploying it to the ESXi cluster we have once I've ensured it meets all the requirements.
(whew, that was a big post. yay virutalization class in college!)