What OS to use for VMs?

[Car712]

Hello, so I am working on a build for a server to host many VMs of various OS's, and I am wondering, what OS would you suggest for this?

The build has 8GB RAM, and a LGA775 CPU

 

I have already looked at VMWare, Openstack, and Unraid.

 

And yes, I know this is not the best build for VMs, but its what I can afford.

[itchkowb]

If you want to buy a windows license, then do that. But if you would like to get an OS for free, then I would go for linux, Ubuntu or Mint or or Fedora would be my suggestions. Hope this helped!

[Kered124]

Proxmox is a pretty solid option.

[Jarsky]

27 minutes ago, WindowsIsLife said:

If you want to buy a windows license, then do that. But if you would like to get an OS for free, then I would go for linux, Ubuntu or Mint or or Fedora would be my suggestions. Hope this helped!

That is not what he's asking. He's asking about hypervisors. 

 

I like VMware ESXi but with the level of the hardware a modern version of it may not be supported..

I'd probably go Proxmox as well, its essentially Ubuntu kernel with KVM

[DogKnight]

VMWare is great and all but it can become very expensive to get access to features and is quite power hungry. vCenter likes a good 10gb of RAM in it's default install regardless of whether it uses it all. 

 

I would aim for a KVM based hypervisor. I am not familiar with the different options, but others have already made some suggestions. 

[Jarsky]

On 9/18/2018 at 1:21 PM, DogKnight said:

VMWare is great and all but it can become very expensive to get access to features and is quite power hungry. vCenter likes a good 10gb of RAM in it's default install regardless of whether it uses it all. 

 

I would aim for a KVM based hypervisor. I am not familiar with the different options, but others have already made some suggestions. 

ESXi is free. You only need vCenter for advanced operations like Clustering, DRS, Centralised licensing, and advanced features like vSan, vRealize and Orchestrator. You don't need vCenter for a single host. 

[AbsoluteFool]

On 17.9.2018 at 11:32 PM, bobbyd52 said:

Hello, so I am working on a build for a server to host many VMs of various OS's, and I am wondering, what OS would you suggest for this?

The build has 8GB RAM, and a LGA775 CPU

 

I have already looked at VMWare, Openstack, and Unraid.

 

And yes, I know this is not the best build for VMs, but its what I can afford.

My guess is that you are on a DPE 2950 or something similar.. ESXI 6.5 would work, but not the latest version. How many VMs you could put on it depends mostly on the RAM, CPU. With 8GB RAM i'd say 3 VMs maybe 6 at maximume if you are very carefully with the allocation. Also you'd need two LGA775 CPUs to my knowledge to actually have enough cores to get up more than 4VMs as each VM will take atleast one core each.

 

For hypervisors there are Hyper-V, ESXI (6.5 as i said), Proxmox, KVM, XCP-NG, XenServer and many more that i don't really bother looking into.