Virtualization hosts

Opinions about what the best options are for virtual machine hosting

[motorhaven]

Hey folks, I have a spare server here that I'm going to deploy client sites on and I want to give them each a guest OS.

The guest OS's will mostly be Windows Server, Centos and Ubuntu. Budget for the hosting software: $0.

I want to make the best use of physical hardware resources, including good management of RAM so I don't have to buy a bunch of additional RAM which will mostly do nothing 90% of the time. Plus the ability to create, save, restore and easily deploy guest OS images.

I've run VirtualBox on my personal/business machines for my own uses, but never deployed a virtual hosting system in the wild. Researching into this, there are so many choices...

VirtualBox, KVM, QEMU, XenServer, etc.

I will need to be able to administer it remotely since it will be co-located, preferably through a GUI (browser based is fine).

Any experience, advice and recommendations would be appreciated.

[graeme_p]

My only experience has been that I found a XenServer install I got landed with quite hard to manage, and I have not been able to find anyone else to do it either.

KVM seems to have a lot of momentum behind it and has a lot of GUI tools.