Which One Should I Use?

Not entirely certain this is the right forum, so Mods, feel free to move this at your discretion.

 

I've currently got 2 computers sitting around, and I'd like to use one of them for a 24/7 modded Minecraft server for me and some friends, or a server I can quickly and easily set up temporary servers for other games on.

The rigs:

One is an HP xw8600 workstation with 16GB of DDR2 and 2 Xeons. They're each dual core, I don't remember the model number, but they're pretty old. It also has dual gigabit ethernet ports, whereas the other only has one. The BIOS supports virtualization, if that means anything to a Linux system.

 

The other is one I made myself. Its got an 8350, and 8GB of DDR3.

 

The graphics cards in each are pretty sucky, so I left them out.

Power consumption isn't really a concern, and I could put any OS on either of them. I was thinking Proxmox and then running a VM of CentOS or something. Any recommendations for an OS?

 

And a final question, how much would running a VM in Proxmox impact performance?

 

Thanks for any help!

For Linux, an OpenVZ container gets something like 98% raw hardware performance. They're great. But for non Linux OSes and some very special uses for Linux, you'll have you use KVM, which has a more significant performance impact.

If it were me, I'd run Proxmox on both, or maybe oVirt. Most game servers use less CPU than RAM, and you won't lose but like 512mb of RAM for the host OS with Proxmox.

Awesome, thanks again K4KFH.