Building the Ultimate Virtual Machine Web Server

Welcome to our series on designing, building, and deploying the ultimate in-house web server for your website. For a complete list of the articles associated with this study, please check out our educational series on: Web hosting Wars. 

Hacky's Guide to Building the Virtual Web Server on a Budget

I've always loved fast cars. Speed is sexy, and whether that's souping up an old sports car or re-purposing an old box you've got lying around, there's just something fun about making something more powerful. For this experiment, we'll be designing a virtual machine on my server I already have in place with the following specs:  

MOBO: Asus z270-A
Processor: Intel i7-6770
Cooling: Corsair H50 Water Cooling
Memory: 2x Corsair Vengeance PC-24000 DDR4 8GB
HDs: 2x Samsung 500gb in a Raid 0 Config connected to 2 x 6/gbps Sata Ports
GC: Gigabyte GTX 1070
OS: Windows 10 Pro


To begin, I started w/ a quick benchmark test to determine the capabilities of my system w/ a 20% overclock using the z270-A mobo built in OC configuration. Here are the results:

Certainly, nothing to write home about, but nonetheless a pretty solid system (if we don't take redundancy into account...usually I'd do a Raid 1 mirror in case one of the SSDs failed...which they seem to do somewhat frequently). To begin building our virtual machine web server, the first thing we'll need to do is compare the top 3 providers of the virtual machine software.

The 3 Top Virtual Machine Applications to Host a Web Sever

To qualify as one of the Top 3 Best Virtual Machine Applications for a Web Server, we required the following criteria:

1) Since this is a budget build, it has to be free and run in a standard desktop environment.

2) Excellent community of followers ready, willing, and able to offer free support.

3) Wide ranging compatibility across Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.

4) Should be easy enough to setup by relative noobs.

In no particular order, our top 3 (and a half) choices include the following virtual machine applications. For a more in depth review, click on the link for each application:

1) Virtual Box by Oracle

2) VMWare Player by 

3) XenServer by Citrix

3 ½) Just for the Linux fans I threw in KVM (Kernel-Based Virtual Machine)

(updated results coming soon!)