Being an IT Project Manager, and not a hardcore techie, what is the best Linux distro to setup VM (virtualbox, KVM, etc) to test different installations of Wordpress, Drupal and Joolma in support of a government project wanting to pick the right CMS?

Thanks,
PHNanouk

So you're looking for suggestions on what kind of distro to setup so clients can test these products? Or will you and your staff be doing the testing? I would highly recommend that you get with your team and see if anyone has any experience setting up these products in any particular environment before.

All that aside I'd recommend using something like CentOS (which will be very close to Red Hat Enterprise Linux [RHEL] and most of the goverment projects I worked on involved RHEL/Solaris/Windows). This assumes of course that you don't have or don't want to spend the money on RHEL. CentOS is pretty easy to setup and has decent support, your products should easily be ported over to them. If you're looking for even simpler setup and an easier user interface Ubuntu server flavors could suit the needs of your virtual environment but I would strongly recommend you use a distro that's going to be similar to what you or your team would be utilizing in the production environment.