hi all,

newbie trying to learn, and will learn how to manage CentOS.

I got hold of a Dell Poweredge T610 (3x 500GB HDD, perc 6/i raid controller and 24GB RAM).

I want to do a bare metal CentOS 7.X installation, then run KVM with CentOS VMs inside as to learn and study for RHEL certification.

Questions:

1) Basically I will need to find out whether CentOS/RHEL 7 supports T610 hardware as from Dell's website it seems that it supports up to v6;

2) If I manage to install CentOS 7.X bare metal (on RAID5); what is the best partitioning structure as to have space available to setup VMs?

Comments are much appreciated

If it'll run CentOS 6 then it shouldn't have issues with CentOS 7

Try it an see!!

My personal preference (as a Windows desktop user) would be to install Citrix XenServer, which is based on Centos, using the default partition structure and then install as many VM guests as you want.

thank you....

I think the idea is to manage RHEL(CentOS) and install KVM (requirement for the certification), hence the approach.....

I've got a laptop running VMware workstation where I can setup CentOS VM.....However for the exam, real experience on managing a physical RHEL(CentOS) with KVM is required (afaik).

I wouldn't be so sure about the C6/C7 parallels. I dual booted C6 & C7 on my (quite old) PC and there were problems with drivers for my ethernet card (in C7). As it happens, the disk containing C7 died so I have gone back to C6 but I think a bit more investigation would be worthwhile.

There are a number of technical changes in 7 from 6 that is true.

Pretty sure you should be able to get this running fine if you did get 6 running on it. I don't know of anything that would prevent the devices from working if you had drivers or could add them in.