Hi

I'm trying to find a comparison of CentOS distributions that is vmware friendly. Does anyone know of a comparison of differences between CentOS distros in which one may have "better" support for virtualization than the other.

Specifically, I'll be running this on a number of dual CPU x86_64 machines with 4 to 8GB ram per box, can increase to 16GB if required. I'm looking to add 2 to four client OS per box in this setup.

Thanks in advance for any assistance or pointers

I'm not aware of any issues across any update of rhel / centos 5. You are aware that Centos does come with it's own virtualization suite, Xen, integrated into it right? No need for VMware.

If it's Linux only VMs then Xen does fine but I have heard it works horribly with Windows VMs, their are also a few bugs that occur with Xen, like after so many installs certain versions of Xen start to corrupt image bootloaders (had that one myself). Also VMWare makes using advanced features easy and reconfiguring VMs to new specs, only problem with VMWare is the licensing, you'd probably find out what you want to do with VMWare requires you to pay for a resale license for the VMs (testing/development on a number of versions of VMWare is free but reselling VMs is generally not) and VMWare is anything but cheap.

I have been working with CentOS 5.3 and VMWARE Server 1.0.8 (Free) without problem, but if you want bare-metal performance, go with ESXi.

Best regards