11-11-2008
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Join Date: May 2008
Last Activity: 26 July 2013, 11:43 AM EDT
Location: Northeastern United States
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CentOS is a solid choice
but If you have any money for it, I am a big fan of SUSE, for the ease of use as well as great support. You can use SLES for a nominal fee as well as OpenSUSE if you want something more bleeding edge. OpenSUSE is free, while CentOS has the benefit of being RHEL but without the "red hat" in it.
If I were you, I'd have a bake off on about 3 and see which ones are easies to use and meet my needs, as well as being secure and update friendly.
Also, VMware ESX is costly, but good. Xen, after being bought by Citrix, lost a lot of flavor for me and some others. As well, without their IO drivers, the performance on IO tasks was mediocre at best.
You can always use the free VMware server on a host OS, with minimal loss.