On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 12:06 PM, Thom Paine <painethom at gmail.com> wrote: > I have a brand new Dell Poweredge T310 server with 4G ram and 1TB > raid-5 hard drive in it. I Really only need to be able to run a copy > of CentOS 5.4 on it, but I'm wondering if in the build process should > I stick on ESXi 4 and then run CentOS as a vm? This would give me the > options to roll out other VM's if I want over the life of the server > (which I likely won't need) but the convenience of having them might > be there. > > I'm only thinking of doing this because ESXi is free, and won't add > any cost to this server. > > This server is going to be a domain controller for 5 workstations > which will run Windows XP, as well as host 1 website with email. It > will setup a few shares for samba, and have one network printer > attached to it. > > Any thoughts to this, or should I just put on CentOS 5.4 and be done > with it? I know it's like asking what everyone's favourite colour is, > but maybe a few replies will give me some ideas. There are many benefits to virtualizing. Except for a few laptops, everything in my house is virtualized with either ESXi, VMWare Server, Xen or KVM. Besides the flexibility, I like the ability to access the servers from whichever room I'm in. I can work in my office and when I want, just take the laptop outside or to kitchen and have all my apps still in place. A domain controller for 5 systems seems particularly well suited for virtualization. The CPU/memory/disk requirements are relatively modest and you'd be able to take better advantage of your Poweredge system. Backups would be easier, as would managing the system since you'd have, in effect, an ILO setup.