The last time I used VB was probably a year or two ago, but I've tried several hypervisors over the past 8 or 10 years: MS hyper-v, xen, kvm, VMware, Virtual Box and they all have advantages and disadvantages, but VB, KVM, and Xen have all been really slow for some reason or another (usually disk access latency.) VMware, with the VMware tools for the VMs, has been blazingly fast for production servers and even desktop OSs. You (all) shouldn't take my word for it, you can get trial versions of any of the pay-for versions and test them out for yourselves.
I've tried to get away from VMware and switch to KVM, but it just works better in most cases for me. Workstation is not that much at ~$170, Fusion is $50(?) and their ESX/i server hypervisor is free.