Virtualization? Which OS to go with?

Cloudmin
1

Hello,

Can someone help me on this? It relates to virtualmin + XEN + 32/64 bit CentOS.

I am new to virtualization.
I want to order a CENTOS server so I can install a few smaller Centos virtual servers with virtualmin and another Centos for voip telephony.
The virtualization I am planning to go with is XEN (opensource).
The questions I have are:

a) Shall I request from the Data Center the main system to be Centos 5.7 64bit? Or 32 Bit?
b) What about the virtualmin virtual server? Should this be 64 or 32 bit?

The dilemma is because I have heard that the 64bit OS requires considerably more memory than the 32bit one.
What are your thoughts?

Thank you

2

You could go with CentOS 6.2. Then you could also explore KVM - Red Hat’s open source visualization. It is similar to XEN. One advantage of KVM is that it is built-in CentOS (Red Hat clone), so no custom kernel required.

I would go for 64bit. you probably have plenty of memory anyway, and just in case you need more than 16GB one day :slight_smile:

And of course you could also look into cloudmin to manage XEN and/or KVM virtual machines :slight_smile:

3

Howdy,

Yeah, like helpmin mentions, I struggle to recommend CentOS 5.x now that 6.x has been out for awhile now.

The best thing about CentOS 5.x in your case though is that it would support Xen out of the box – whereas, CentOS 6.x does KVM. KVM should work fine though if you don’t mind learning it.

CentOS 6 has much newer tools.

Both are supported for a ridiculously long time (5 is supported until 2017, 6 until 2020).

I suspect you’d reach a point where you’d want to upgrade just because the packages are old, long before you hit the EOL :slight_smile:

a) Shall I request from the Data Center the main system to be Centos 5.7 64bit? Or 32 Bit? b) What about the virtualmin virtual server? Should this be 64 or 32 bit?

Those are all personal preference – there are benefits and drawbacks to both. You’re right that 64bit does require more RAM, twice as much in some cases. But it’s also faster.

Virtualmin will work fine under either, so you’d just need to weigh your performance needs vs your available RAM.

4

Forgot to mention, some software/packages are only available for the 64bit version of CentOS. I don’t have an example right now (memory issues :slight_smile: