I am planning to migrate my CentOS 7.9 to either one of RHEL 9.1, AlmaLinux 9.1 or Rocky Linux 9.1. But I cannot make up my mind at all. I have no idea which one is the best to install Virtualmin. Please advise which OS works BEST with Virtualmin, without any hiccups.
You can read more about my consideration at the following links.
Please advise whether it is possible to migrate CentOS 7.9 to RHEL 9.1, AlmaLinux 9.1 or Rocky Linux 9.1. I am wondering if a FRESH installation of RHEL 9.1/AlmaLinux 9.1/Rocky Linux 9.1 and FRESH installation of Virtualmin is the only way and the best way out. But how can I transfer all the websites, blogs, forums, and mailboxes FROM CentOS 7.9 if I do a FRESH installation of everything???
I’ve noticed that during every release of Rocky and Alma that the number of users in the torrent is quite different. During the last 48 hours I’ve observed 100’s of users downloading/sharing Alma but only 6-9 with Rocky. I doubt this will make any difference to anyone but I found it interesting.
I don’t think cPanel supports Rocky yet. That probably has a lot to do with the ratio. For whatever unfathomable reason, cPanel still has the lion’s share of the panel market.
For what it’s worth, I’m running Virtualmin Pro on three production servers on top of Rocky (8.7 as of yesterday’s update), and I have no complaints. I have no experience with 9. To say I’m not an early adopter would be an understatement.
It doesn’t matter. If you prefer Alma, go for it. Rocky is the original CentOS founder’s project, along with some other CentOS maintainers, and I trust them. So…that’s where I went.
Virtualmin don’t care. They should all be RHEL compatible. Alma, I think, has a few extra optional things that would maybe make it different (and that would probably be a bad thing, IMHO), but I haven’t looked into it at all. We tested on the base Alma 8 and 9 (much less testing on 9 thus far, though!) and it works. And, we’ll fix bugs when we find them.
Popularity is irrelevant. If they are binary compatible, you can switch between them with minimal fuss. If something happens and the “unpopular” one goes away, just switch to another one. Though I don’t see how the number of Torrents for a specific image can possibly be indicative of anything. The download links on the Rocky site are not torrent links; obviously most downloads of Rocky are direct downloads from the http mirrors. I have no idea which one is more popular.
But, again: If they are binary compatible with RHEL, then it doesn’t matter. That’s kinda the point.
According to DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking, AlmaLinux is more popular than Rocky Linux. AlmaLinux is ranked no. 16 while Rocky Linux is ranked no. 33 (as of 18 Nov 2022 Friday).
Actually this is not a problem because I have free RHEL developer subscription license. But you need to login to your Red Hat Account after installing RHEL 9.1.
I have decided to do fresh new installation of RHEL 9.1, AlmaLinux 9.1 OR Rocky Linux 9.1 on a brand new server and then do a fresh new installation of Virtualmin.
I will create backups of the Virtual Servers using the Virtualmin GUI web interface in CentOS 7.9 and then restore the backups in the brand new RHEL 9.1 or AlmaLinux 9.1 or Rocky Linux 9.1 server with Virtualmin. Will there be any complications??
So my question is: Are there any excellent and well-written guides on performing backup and restore within Virtualmin itself? I need to take changes in IPv4 address of the master Virtualmin server into consideration.
I use vultr.com to test OS’s and installing VM as minimal cost as they only charge per hour, so a days testing only cost a few cents. Then you can see what OS you like.
Only OS they don’t have is RHEL 9.1
From the context, I think what Joe meant is that the popularity doesn’t matter.
I’ll reiterate that I suspect a great many people who chose AlmaLinux did so because as of the last time I had reason to care, it was supported by cPanel when Rocky wasn’t. So if someone was committed to using cPanel, Rocky wasn’t an option.
Panel compatibility is a perfectly sensible reason for choosing an OS. But popularity based on that compatibility is irrelevant unless you also plan to use that panel.
I don’t use Redhat/Alma/Rocky/CentOS – I used to, like 12+ years ago – but got burned and have been using Debian ever since.
So I’m not trying to support ALMA or ROCKY… although, from what I’ve seen, the Rocky developer has set up Rocky the SAME WAY he set up CentOS so it “could/might” face the same fate.
But, again, I don’t care because I use Debian.
And, although people might try to explain how “popularity” doesn’t matter… it always does. If your product isn’t popular, you can’t keep it afloat.
My points about ALMA were OBSERVATION – not SPECULATION. So I apologize for appearing to be PRO-ALMA. I just wanted to point out that ALMA IS POPULAR so our developers would be encouraged to continue their struggle to properly auto-detect the Alma version. : )
Whew! tldr;
Something else I noticed – the “minimal” version of Alma and Rocky are very different in FILE SIZE… Rocky is over 300 MEG SMALLER – I wonder what Rocky is missing. Oops, there, I did it again… I’m sounding ANTI-ROCKY.
