I recently bought a power efficient server with an intel atom c2758 (8 core) and 8 gb of ram. I also got a 500gb ssd. I have a couple of VPS from two companies two have half a cpu core, 512mb ram and 20gb of storage, and the other has 2 cpu cores, 768mb ram, and 200gb of storage.

My goal is going to be getting rid of my 3 vps, upgrading to business class internet, and hosting them myself.

Here are my questions.

1. Would it be ideal to have the os on one drive and the virtual machine images on another drive?

2. For the OS on the host machine would Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS be ok or should I try Cent OS 7? I guess my question here is would one or the other be significantly better for my application.

3. For virtualization I was thinking of using proxmox for kvm vms, but I'm not really sure what other alternative's there are.

Basically I know 2 and 3 are fairly option based questions and I'm not expecting someone to do all my research if people could help point me in the right direction or tell me things I should consider I'd be very grateful.

It may help to have the VM's on different drives but on proxmox I'd think the disk overhead on boot drive would be minimal.

May be better to raid it for speed.


Pretty sure proxmox is really the host so you have a choice of traditional OS or some baremetal (that is debian I think) proxmox.


Folks tend to stick with one or the other. Debian based or RedHat based or Suse based maybe be most common. Consider bsd's too.


VM's speed up one way or the other and the clients matter here too. Virtual machines from companies may have features you wish. There are a number of free solutions. XEN, KVM, virtualbox and such.

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I've never used Ubuntu server and probably wouldn't. However I did run CentOS and it was very stable.
Reading the CentOS documentation will help you to learn how to run it as it is RH based.

https://www.centos.org/download/
https://wiki.centos.org/Documentation

You could use KVM. I've always used Virtual Box and found that it works great.

https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page
https://www.virtualbox.org/

https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Virtu...ion/VirtualBox

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Thanks by the time I read this I'd already bought a second smaller (120gb) ssd, so I guess I'm going to install the os on the smaller one. Also thanks for pointing that out about proxmox, looking into it, it looks like proxmox is an os/client and you can't install it on a different os. So I found (link) a similar kvm package ovirt that can be installed on an os so I think I'll give it a go.

Thanks for the input I think I'll try centos, I've dealt with it a few times and stability would be ideal. I know I could go with kvm and didn't realize you could run virtual box headless... but I really like the idea of a package with web interface so it'll be easy to manage.


Thank you both for the insight!

You're welcome.

Let us know how things go.