Is it possible to use virtualbox in production?

Question

virtual box

There is a half-server machine, a mother machine on a C-chipset, a Xeon processor, Intel network, but non-ECC RAM. Also, 3 SATA disks 500Gb+1Tb+1Tb. It is required to deploy several virtual machines. I tried ESXi 6.7 - started up with a half-kick, tested it - it works. I do not like the fact that with ESXi it will not be possible to organize mirroring of terrabytes, on which it is planned to place virtual machines, because there are no built-in hypervisor tools, and the ESXi RAID controller integrated into the MP does not know and detects the disks in the array simply as ordinary disks. There is an idea to use Debian 9 + Virtualbox as a hypervisor: install the OS and software on 500, and combine terabytes using mdadm into RAID1 and use this array for virtual machines. Such a scheme will work, I used it in some places, but there a maximum of 1-2 not very critical virtual machines were without load, on the same machine there will be more serious tasks. Then it will still change to a normal server with a hardware RAID controller and other blackjack, but for now, like this. The question is - is such an implementation suitable for more or less serious production and what pitfalls can come out? Guest OS - Windows, Linux. I ask you to argue your answers a little higher than the level "ESXi is our everything and in general a corporate standard!" and other fan chants.

Answer 1

VirtualBox is stable and works great. The stability of the work depends more on the components of the host machine. There is an office where from 2013 everything worked on Ubuntu 12.04 + Virtualbox 4.5 until the beginning of 2018, a file dump, a controller, a terminal server. Uptimes were for several years (I confess it was rarely updated). Now, though, everything has migrated to ESX, but the host is still alive, the virtual machines are working.

Answer 2

You can also install KVM on Debian - also a corporate standard, actually.