What Server Distro?

Hello all, I am new to these forums. ;) Looking for a little bit of advice for setting up a linux server.

I have been asked to help set up a linux server at a hospital I work at in a VM environment. I have set up servers in the past mostly ubuntu servers for small office and home setups. But this is going to be for a much larger environment. This server will be used for a 100gb mail storage for 30 days. I am the most comfortable with ubuntu server but from what I can find, Centos and Red Hat are the most stable, but I am not as efficient with those 2. What I am looking for is LTS distros and what would be the recommended distro for a VM, I do not really need the GUI as I am descent in the CLI. Learning commands for centos and red hat won’t be a problem either if they are the recommended distro then I will just learn about them.


What I need to know is .
• What version of ubuntu server, centos and redhat LTS would be recommended.
• Why is your recommended distro better then the other distros?


Thanks for your advice 

Hello and welcome! :)

If I were setting up a server right now, I'd probably use CentOS (a clone of RHEL) because of it's long history and proven record.

You can check the following thread for how others have voted in our 'server recommendations' poll:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/cof...ge-2013-a.html

For a production system, 100% RHEL or CentOS. Support cycle is longer. Proven distro in production world wide.

Ubuntu is good if you have a specific need that RHEL or CentOS cannot fulfill.

I recommend using the newest version of RHEL/CentOS, 6.

+1 for RHEL or CentOS. Debian is also a very good server distro and the "stable" release tends to be supported for long periods just like RHEL or CentOS.

Welcome aboard!
CentOS and Debian are right up there for my suggestions.
If you don't rely heavily on GUI tools, then I'd go for Debian first.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jayd512

Welcome aboard!
CentOS and Debian are right up there for my suggestions.
If you don't rely heavily on GUI tools, then I'd go for Debian first.

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My day job is performance engineering for a major mobile phone manufacturer, helping manage 1000's of servers world wide. Our primary server systems are CentOS 6.2, although I would prefer 6.3 (corporate inertia at work). My personal workstations and laptops run either our internal clone of RHEL 6.3, CentOS 6.3, or Scientific Linux 6.3 - all of which are Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 systems or clones. They are very reliable, running 365x24 without problems. FWIW, my division provides online services and web browsing tools for over 100M customers (200M by end of this year).

I like centos. Running 5.9 at the moment.