Best distro for virtual machine

[Weyla]

Hi,

I am planning to reinstall my messed up ubuntu server and this time separate the processes into multiple virtual machines with kvm.

I have never done this before and i am wondering what would be the smallest possible distro to use for the virtual machines and how much ram should i give them?

I am planning to run openvpn, pihole, deluge server(100-200 torrent but probably gonna cut down to around 20-50), plex media server, plex client with openbox, nextcloud server.

[jj9987]

Choose the distro that supports all the applications you want to run (either natively or in Docker), you are most familiar with and/or the one you want to learn. Most common free server distros are Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS.

[igormp]

Are you asking for the host of guest OS recommendations?

 

I've been a fan of ESXi for a long time as a host OS, although it's not free. I've also used OpenMediaVault as a general home server distro with many containers/VMs inside of it. I've also heard nice things about proxmox.

 

As for guest OS, well, that's really up to what you're comfortable with along with software support. I personally prefer CentOS, followed by Debian if the first one doesn't fit for some reason.

 

Another nice thing that you could take a look at is using containers instead of VMs. Gives you way more flexibility, albeit with a lesser degree of isolation. CoreOS is a nice fit for that.

[manikyath]

mehh.. fully virtualizing all your services is rather overkill on linux, if you keep clean house.

 

as for an OS recommendation.. if you're running "many" instances, i'd suggest something like ubuntu server, because of its extremely low resource usage.

[Weyla]

47 minutes ago, igormp said:

Are you asking for the host of guest OS recommendations?

I am asking about the guest.

27 minutes ago, manikyath said:

mehh.. fully virtualizing all your services is rather overkill on linux, if you keep clean house.

 

as for an OS recommendation.. if you're running "many" instances, i'd suggest something like ubuntu server, because of its extremely low resource usage.

I am just learning these stuff so probably its safer to run them separated, maybe combine some of them to save some resources.

 

Is there any ubuntu version that is smaller than the server version and need even less resources or its low enough as it is?

[manikyath]

4 minutes ago, Weyla said:

I am asking about the guest.

I am just learning these stuff so probably its safer to run them separated, maybe combine some of them to save some resources.

 

Is there any ubuntu version that is smaller than the server version and need even less resources or its low enough as it is?

ubuntu server is just about as barebones you can go, last time i checked it used about 60MB ram for the operating system.

[Weyla]

Then i will stick with that since my biggest concern was the ram usage.

Thank you everybody!