Ubuntu or Centos / Physical or Virtual ?

[stebbo]

Hello,

I am about to embark on a project to trial FOG for our school. I see that Ubuntu (or Fedora) are the recommended operating systems and that it works on Centos. I see from the forums that there appears to be problems with Ubuntu 14.04.

I’m looking for recommendations on whether to use Ubuntu or Centos. I’m reasonably comfortable with both, but find that Centos works a lot better in our environment. If Centos “mostly works” then I’ll probably go with Ubuntu but if Centos is just as good then I’d prefer that.

If Ubuntu is the recommendation, then I would probably go for 12.04LTS.

Also, I am wondering about running this in a virtual environment under Hyper-V. I’m not going to have a large installation, somewhere around 500 machines, and they probably won’t be pxe-booting by default, only when they need to be re-imaged.

In summary, my preferred setup would be a Centos VM running under Hyper-V, but if I’m just buying trouble with that setup then I’ll go with whatever is best.

Thanks in advance.
Chris.

[VincentJ]

I run all my FOG servers as VMs, mainly in VMware ESXi or XenServer 6.2.

for 0.32 I had all Ubuntu but for 1.x.x I’m now using Debian 7 and it’s not been a problem at all. My virtualbox test clients boot loop but none of the physicals do the same…

You may be limited by your storage if you have lots of active VMs on the same SR/Datastore since disks only go so fast and aren’t the best performance for random IO. You may also get limitations on your network if you have active VMs on the same physical NIC… a 1gb link can be swallowed quickly while imaging.

everything depends how much performance you need, what hardware you have and how often you are going to be imaging.

[stebbo]

Hi Tom,

thanks for the response. I look forward to giving the system a try.

Cheers,
Chris.

[Tom Elliott]

@stebbo, post: 31089, member: 24746 said:

Hello,

I am about to embark on a project to trial FOG for our school. I see that Ubuntu (or Fedora) are the recommended operating systems and that it works on Centos. I see from the forums that there appears to be problems with Ubuntu 14.04.

I’m looking for recommendations on whether to use Ubuntu or Centos. I’m reasonably comfortable with both, but find that Centos works a lot better in our environment. If Centos “mostly works” then I’ll probably go with Ubuntu but if Centos is just as good then I’d prefer that.

If Ubuntu is the recommendation, then I would probably go for 12.04LTS.

Also, I am wondering about running this in a virtual environment under Hyper-V. I’m not going to have a large installation, somewhere around 500 machines, and they probably won’t be pxe-booting by default, only when they need to be re-imaged.

In summary, my preferred setup would be a Centos VM running under Hyper-V, but if I’m just buying trouble with that setup then I’ll go with whatever is best.

Thanks in advance.
Chris.

The “recommendation” for Ubuntu isn’t necessarily always true.

It is absolutely true that Ubuntu 14.04 has it’s issues though I think most of those problems have been ironed out in SVN Trunk of FOG.

Hyper-V shouldn’t pose much of a problem though I’m hearing mixed reports that the undionly.kpxe doesn’t like the console part and sometimes throws errors. A physical dedicated system is preferred, but things should function especially if the Hyper-V is the server rather than a client that you’re going to use to build your images.

I personally use CentOS 6.5 for my test environment, while many of the other developers seem to use Ubuntu (10 up to 13).

There are mixed cases of those using Ubuntu 14.04 as well.

The only things that aren’t native to CentOS but are within the Debian installer guide is clamav and htmldoc.

Most of the reason for this is because CentOS doesn’t include the repos/installers natively to it for clamav and htmldoc. That all said, if you install without clamav and htmldoc the only two parts that would be affected are virus scans (which may still work because clamav is built into the init) and the ability to print reports in PDF form. If you need these, the WIKI describes how to install the repositories for yum to download and install these two utilities.