Gentlemen,

I first want to thank you for this web site. These forums have been extremely useful and it is appreciated.

My question is this ...

I need to set up an infrastructure where we will be using Xen to set up a virtual environment. We are setting up a virtual environment to allow for more flexibility when it comes time to move more into a production environment.

Eventually we will have several virtual servers running versions of Apache, Tomcat and PostgreSQL.

I am leaning towards using Debian as a host OS but the person I am assisting wants to use Red Hat as the OS. My problem with Red Hat is that it is not a free download and I find that getting assistance is much easier in the Debian world than it is in the Red Hat world.

I would like your impression regarding this prior to doing my initial install and committing myself to one flavor or the other.

Your thoughts are appreciated...

Thanks

Debian:

+ free download, massive community

- despite the size of the community, it's not guaranteed that you'll get an answer to your problem (most of our gurus may be on holiday or they'll have other things to do)


Red Hat:

- not free of charge,

+ you pay for the support, and you pay a lot, I've never used it, but theoretically speaking I'd imagine that the moment you've got a problem, you'll just ring them and expect a professional support (I don't know how it looks like in practice

For Redhat you can use Centos, which is a free re-packaged version of RHEL.