Virtualized web server

[Emil]

Hi!

I do not know very much about virtualization, I've mainly used it to
test web pages on Windows and test new operating systems on my
workstation. But now I was thinking about using it on my quite small web
server. I don't have very fast hardware, so it might be really stupid.
What I like is the idea of having a minimal OS (I don't know if that
should be linux or bsd, solaris, or whatever) on my server and then
create a virtualbox disk image with my ubuntu web server on it. I could
create the image on my workstation and then transfer it to my main
server and my backup server. And if anything go bad I can just transfer
a new copy of the image from my workstation to the server (and rsync the
backup copy of /var/www and mysql db).

Is this just a stupid idea, or will this work? I understand I will lose
some performance. Does other do this, if not, why?

Thanks for your time

Kind Regards Emil