CentOS

There's not enough of any OS in a bare metal hypervisor to run a VPN client - so use method two, a bare metal hypervisor with VM Guests, and the first guest is a firewall appliance running your VPN setup, then all the other VM Guests connect via the first VM (your VPN gateway).

vonskippy wrote:Take a look at Proxmox

https://www.proxmox.com/proxmox-ve/comparison

Personally, I avoid running a FULL BLOWN Distro as the HOST, use a bare metal hypervisor and run ALL systems as VM Guests. You get better resource management PLUS you don't waste resources on the host os PLUS you get better security.

Or you could use the free version of ESXi if you just need a simple and robust BareMetalHypervisor.

A "Bare Metal" Hypervisor is also referred to as a "Type 1" hypervisor. KVM is also a Type 1 hypervisor. Performance of guests under KVM is close to native.

You recommend using ESXi, but doesn't this require a Windows box to manage it?

As for the "overhead" of a distro -- you can configure a very minimal CentOS install with KVM. You don't need to assign an IP address to any Internet facing Ethernet ports, but the guests can still use these Internet-facing ports.

I perfectly agree with Whoever » 2013/12/30 05:45:55

Even a "full blown distro" could be configured-down to just a few necessary services running, with firewall and VPN and basically nothing else. I even would not fear to expose such a box into public web, providing no network service is open publicly there (web server, etc). A bunch of installed packages making up the "full blown" distro are just sitting on a drive, not runnning in a memory, and therefore not presenting any security risk at all. Vulnerable is the code which runs, not the one which just sits on a drive. With an up-to-date kernel, such a setup is no less secure than a specialized firewall appliance, imho.

Concerning a graphical interface, this is a point to which spel565 should concentrate. Either VirtualBox (because of 3D acceleration support) or KVM should serve best, imho.

It is of course possible to run CentOS as the host. but i would prefer a Hypervisor of some kind.
vmware scared me away years ago because of the lack of management in a Linux only environment.

i used to run KVM's and i simply love it, take a look at http://www.proxmox.com/

puertorico wrote:It is of course possible to run CentOS as the host. but i would prefer a Hypervisor of some kind.

What do you think KVM under CentOS is? It is a hypervisor.

vonskippy wrote:Or you could use the free version of ESXi if you just need a simple and robust BareMetalHypervisor.

Caution with "free" ESXi 5.5. "Free" ESXi 5.5 is now only useful for short term education.

Hope this link come across ok:

http://www.tinkertry.com/best-parts-of- ... ree-uh-oh/