Ok, in order to explain what I want to do, I probably need to give people a bit of background information.

I currently have a fairly basic Celeron 3.2, 1GB DDR2 with a 160Gb hard disk as my server in the flat. It's running Centos 4.4, and has never really let me down. However, given the choice of distributions and different things I want to do with it (such as test out a Zimbra Server) which requires an empty (virtual) machine, I've decided to opt for the virtualisation route.

Now, I'm probably a bit naive in that I know that performance isn't likely to be amazing on a Celeron D 3.2, but I want to know if I should give it a go. I'd probably run two virtual machines constantly (one for me email and websites, and the other for messing around with). I'm aware that upgrading the RAM is probably going to be needed in the near future, and that is something I'm willing to do, providing the processor is likely to last..

My personal understanding of what virtualisation entails, is that the server runs on a lightweight OS, and the virtual machines run as processes upon that. I want to know if anyone has experience of implementing virtualisation, so I can be directed to some good documentation.

Hope to hear from you guys soon!