For setting up Moodle, I want to install Ubuntu server LTS 14.04 in a machine. But it already has Windows server 2012. Can I install Ubuntu server without losing Windows server 2012?
2 Answers
You can use different virtualization tools to do this. Depending on your specific Windows license, you might use Hyper-V to run Ubuntu, or you run both inside a VM on e.g. ESXi or KVM or countless other approaches.
However, doing this might be a bad idea, depending on even more factors like the hardware used and the use case, especially that of your Windows Server - using an AD DC as Hyper-V host is generally considered a very bad idea.
If you want to run both OS together then you can use vmware or Oracle VirtualBox to solve your requirement. My preferred one is oracle VirtualBox software. Install this freeware and create a new virtual machine. Then install Ubuntu in that virtual machine.
Make sure you have enough system resources in the server as running a virtual machine requires allotting a part of RAM to the virtual machine from your actual server.
Both these servers will have shared network and you can configure the virtual machine to connect to your network as good as an actual server in network.
IF your requirement is only to run moodles and not Ubuntu, then you can install WAMP or XAMPP in your windows server 2012 itself without much trouble. XAMPP/WAMP gives enough to run mysql, php and apache which are needed for Moodles.
IF your server is in the production environment try installing applications separately. Like install php, MySQL on windows. Configure IIS with all security and performance settings. Then run moodles from there. Apache can also be used for this, but IIS will give you more performance, as it has cache features.
@sven is right that xampp and wamp are not for production servers, but not everybody needs the performance of a production configuration, everytime. In this case @harikrishnan has not mentioned the environment. thats why i suggested them.
