[bitfolk] Xen virtualisation experience and advice

Hi, I'm interested in running Xen on a spare computer in order to get some hands on experience with virtualisation and other aspects of running linux and networking. My Bitfolk VPS is running Debian, and I have the most experience with that distribution, however I think I saw that Bitfolk were using Ubuntu on new servers and was wondering which distribution would be best for me? As the computer will be used purely for experimenting with I thought I'd run the unstable or testing branch of whichever distribution in order to get the latest code. I'd like to keep the installations as minimal and well documented as possible so was wondering whether debootstrap (or the appropriate alternative) would be the best way to go for installation of the OS? Its likely that I might want to use the host for staging/testing of my virtual machine destined for my Bitfolk VPS, is there anything I'd need to do in particular to make sure that it'd be compatible? or would any Xen domain be easy to copy over? Finally, as I said above I'd like to document and record the configuration and running of the host as much as possible. I previously tried using dokuwiki for a similar purpose, however I had a few issues when it came to printing the documentation and would like to make keeping and (if possible) automating documentation as easy as possible. So I'd appreciate any suggestions on that. Thanks in advance for your help, sorry my email is a bit long! :-)