Best Unix Distro for vSphere?

Just want to play with Unix flavoured OS's such as BSD etc.

Which ones work really well as virtual machines on vSphere ? BSD / Slackware ? Other ?

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forkvoid

All of them. ESX works in such a way that the guest OS has no idea that it's virtualized, so it doesn't care. I haven't ran into a single issue yet. I have plenty of Debian and CentOS installs.

jibbajabba

forkvoid wrote: »

All of them. ESX works in such a way that the guest OS has no idea that it's virtualized, so it doesn't care. I haven't ran into a single issue yet. I have plenty of Debian and CentOS installs.

Debian / CentOS are Linux distros and not REALLY Unix ones .. I know that there is TECHNICALLY no issue - but a lot of people seem to have issues with BSD for example but I rather want other people opinnions ...

So yea - talking about Unix ones (Solaris, BSD or other)

forkvoid

Gomjaba wrote: »

Debian / CentOS are Linux distros and not REALLY Unix ones .. I know that there is TECHNICALLY no issue - but a lot of people seem to have issues with BSD for example but I rather want other people opinnions ...

So yea - talking about Unix ones (Solaris, BSD or other)

Sorry, I misread, since Slackware is kind of borderline. Linux, but underpinnings are very BSD-like. After a quick search, I do see that the BSDs aren't officially supported, but many people have no trouble running them. I'll leave this to those who are actually running BSD, then. My apologies.

jibbajabba

forkvoid wrote: »

Sorry, I misread, since Slackware is kind of borderline. Linux, but underpinnings are very BSD. After a quick search, I do see that the BSDs aren't officially supported, but many people have no trouble running them. I'll leave this to those who are actually running BSD, then. My apologies.

Just read myself that Slackware is considered Linux *oops* ...

I read that a lot comes down to the virtual machine tools ... Mmmm... more research

demonfurbie

open bsd

broc

I installed and configured various releases of OpenBSD and FreeBSD on ESXi without a problem in lab and production environment with full functionality. You can install the VMWare tools easily on FreeBSD, it is a bit more complicated with OpenBSD but it is still possible (with 4.6 sure, I actually haven't tried with 4.7 yet).

demonfurbie

i hear 4.7 really makes a diff

free and open bsd are usually the best bets unless you want linux then suse/redhat work well but to me they have a little extra bloat with the gui and all that

MentholMoose

demonfurbie wrote: »

free and open bsd are usually the best bets unless you want linux then suse/redhat work well but to me they have a little extra bloat with the gui and all that

Don't install a GUI. It's not required to do so. For Linux installs I typically do a minimal install and go from there, only adding the bare minimum of required software.