I've smoked Virginias in conical and cylindrical chambers, taller narrow chambers, shorter wide chambers, bulldogs, Dublins, pots, billiards, and they smoke well in all of those options. My personal experience suggests that moisture content determines a lot of what I get out of a blend, along with slightly different packing depending on the cut.
Virginias will school you. For optimal results I recommend smoking them as slowly as you can, sipping just enough to keep the blend barely simmering, at the edge of going out.
On the matter of thick VS thin walls, when I first got seriously into smoking Virginias after years of smoking English and Balkan blends I smoked them in the same way that I did English only to find that they really got hot very quickly. I was smoking Rattray's HOTW at that time and it would just suddenly get very hot, which affected the flavor in a negative way.
To better train myself I switched to using thin walled pipes so that I would become aware of the temperature as I smoked. Thick walls protect you, but thin walls reveal what is going on. Once I got my cadence, moisture, and packing worked out so that I could maintain the burn at a low temperature, I could smoke Virginias in just about anything and have an enjoyable smoke.