• SLES (Novell Suse Enterprise)
• Redhat (Enterprise Linux)

I have been using both OSes to hosting Oracle DB and so far it’s been working great. My personal choice would be Redhat, but I know you can get better pricing and features (from the licensing point of view) with Novell… if you know how to deal with these guys.

I don’t like much Fedora either because of quick end-of-life (EOF) for updates and upgrading usually costs money, requires downtime and somewhat complex for novice users. So we have rounded down to Centos Linux or FreeBSD. Very good, let’s continue.

FreeBSD is powerful BSD oriented operating system, very reliable, secure (of course if you update it as all other OS) and scalable. Centos is a Redhat Enterprise whitebox clone that is reliable and easy to keep updated due to YUM interface. Much longer EOF comparing to Fedora makes it a much better choice.

While I am more oriented towards Linux – Centos would be my choice of the best OS from the list above, however if you are BSD savvy user – more Unix oriented, go for FreeBSD – it’s powerful, IO-fast, high performance box you could count on.