I don't have any experience with Virtualbox, but it will almost certainly use more resources than a typical security suite. Virtualization software has to emulate all of the hardware that the guest OS needs in order to function, and that's pretty labor-intensive.
Regarding your initial question of whether it's safer: not necessarily. It depends on what you do with it. A guest OS inside a virtual environment can be infected by malware just like an OS running directly on hardware, and any important data stored inside that guest OS can be lost just as easily - unless you keep it isolated from the Internet by, say, disabling all virtual NICs. Now, if the guest OS does become infected, no matter how bad it gets, the infection will stay inside that guest OS and won't spread to your host OS or other guest OSes (well, not without a lot of help from you), so you're safer in that sense. Plus it's usually pretty easy to reinstall a guest OS if things get really bad.
The upshot: Safer? Depends. And you'll take a performance hit.
|