I just purchased myself a IBM System x3650 and was wondering what the best way to set it up is. I'm going to be running 5 Drupal (php) websites from it. I have read numerous articles on virtualization and was wondering how I would go about doing this. Is virtualization better on a Windows machine VS Linux? Can I use Oracle VirtualBox. Any kind of help would be greatly appreciated!
If you're just going to run a bunch of websites, you don't need virtualization.
Virtualization takes your physical hardware and allows you to logically allocate it to virtual machines. You would install a hypervisor (such as Hyper-V or VMware ESX) rather than an Operating System. Then, you could create virtual machines and install Operating Systems on those (you can install any OS that the hypervisor support). Most hypervisors support Windows and Linux.
However to run 5 websites, use a web server that allows you to run multiple web sites on a single server. Both apache (httpd) and IIS (Windows Web Server) allow this. Virtualization would be overkill to accomplish this task.