[Scottish] Virtual machines

[Phillip Bennett]

Hi everyone,

I will be buying a new server in the next couple of months and would like to 
put a VM on it to get rid of one of our other servers.  The new server will 
be our main file server.  It will be running ldap, samba and DNS, but mainly 
just serving files.  It will also be a domain master for our network.  I'm 
looking to get two quad core xeons and 8GB RAM.

What I'm thinking of is running our backup server in a VM instead of an 
actual machine.  It only ever does any work after hours, when the other 
machines are idle, so I figure they shouldn't interfere with each other. 
Does this sounds like a viable idea to everyone?  Or should I not bother. 
I'm worried about the performance hit the machine could take during the day, 
but as I'm not a VM expert, I figure there shouldn't be too much, as the VM 
would be doing very little (if anything).

If this sounds viable, which VM would people recommend?  I'm thinking of 
either Xen, VMware or KVM.  KVM would be harder, as I'll be running RHEL 4 
or 5 on it.

All comments appreciated.

Thanks,
Phil.