Optimum virtualisation environment

[batfastad]

Hi everyone

With the steady progress happening on Zimbra v6 I am finally looking at moving us away from Exchange SBS 2003.
Got an Intel Core2Duo running as our file/intranet server at the moment with a 3Ware RAID card serving up 5x1TB in a RAID 6 or storage to our network. Already got 8GB of ECC memory and redundant PSUs in there.

I'm looking to re-use this hardware and set up a virtualised Zimbra installation.
I'll be upgrading the processor to a quad core Xeon.
And adding another 2x1TB drives as a RAID 1 into the spare channels of the 3Ware RAID card for our Zimbra storage.
We're a small publishing business of 12 users (3 of those remote) and at the moment our Exchange mailboxes and public folders total about 40GB... I realise it's difficult to predict how much this will become under Zimbra but I'm guessing it should be well below 1TB

As I see it I have 2 options.
1) Split the server into 2 VMs... one for file server/LAMP intranet and another dedicated to Zimbra.
2) Leave the existing file server/LAMP intranet there and just add a VM for Zimbra as a guest.

I was looking to use Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as the main host OS and then JeOS for the guest(s).

Does that sound like a decent plan?

I'm thinking option #1 would be the most logical and sensible thing to do.
I'm just about to start testing Ubuntu and virtualisation since I've never messed around with it on Linux.

Also I was thinking of VMWare but is there another option I should be looking at?

Cheers, B