That's sort of what I've been envisioning running something like VMWare's Hypervisor (esxi) or windows hyper-V. Then I can essentially clone a VM daily as a backup and essentially not have any downtime while reducing the server's footprint, decrease power costs and server costs.
Towards that end, I'd suggest that you consider the base OS on CENTOS6 (free version of RH Enterprise). That will allow you to have a solid base OS that can also run all of the services that you might need, while giving you the flexibility to bring whole machines up and down. My Dev/Test box has ~10 VMs on it {e.g. XP, W7, WinServer, RHEL, Ubu, ...} that you can bring up and down, clone, suspend, and quickly tinker with as you need or see fit.
I run SFTP, NFS, Git, KVM, LAMP, services that each VM can access, as well as the network bridging in memory, so the VMs are isolated unless I want/let them get out.
As Wendell would say, "... and did I mention that it is free?"
A basic install is just a few minutes work - mostly disk time.
