Consolidate your Servers with VirtualBox
It has been quite a while now since I've used virtualBox to run my Virtual machines, and honestly, I'm satisfied with its performance. I have been using this virtualisation package to run a few CentOS 5 servers as well as Windows OSes.
CentOS 5.x runs really well on VirtualBox. Although I have not tested other linux distros, I believe they should run well too. One thing I've noticed so far is that, there is an issue of properly detecting the network if you're trying to install CentOS 6. You'll have to do some workarounds to get its network up and running. So I would suggest to refrain running CentOS 6 on VirtualBox as of the moment.
Windows guests are also supported but does not run really well. To get optimum performance of Windows guests, you would need to set the video memory to 128MB (highest) and tweak Windows for best performance (this will disable all those Windows fancy effects and transitions). If you are serious about running Windows guests on your Mac, I suggest you use Parallels Desktop.
To quote:
"VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.
Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, OS/2, and OpenBSD.
VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while Oracle ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria."
Try it and share your experience!
You can download the latest version of VirtualBox here.
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Consolidate your Servers with VirtualBox