[H-GEN] Linux Distribution for A Dell Poweredge 840?

[Adrian Sutton]

Hi all,
We've just taken ownership of a new Dell Poweredge 840 that we'll be  
running VMWare on to provide various demo servers (IWWCM, Confluence,  
Vignette and pretty much every other CMS you can imagine on various  
OS's, all on VMs). We figured Linux would be a less resource hungry  
host OS and should provide better memory management, but we're stuck  
on deciding which distro to use.

Our two existing Linux server both run Debian. The public facing one  
runs Debian stable and the internal only one is running Debian  
testing. I regret running Debian testing on the internal server - the  
constant stream of updates is just too scary and we didn't really  
need the newer packages.

Since this server is just going to host VMWare, we don't need up to  
date packages for it .

The new server does have SATA2 which I believe Debian stable doesn't  
support out of the box.

Dell officially support SUSE and RedHat, but have reports of success  
running Debian on various PowerEdge servers listed on their website.

Help? :)

Thanks,

Adrian Sutton
http://www.symphonious.net