Knowledge Base

(MultiVPS) How many OS do you offer? Are custom ISOs supported?

C-Servers offers a total of 15+ operating systems. There are slight technical differences between the OSes offered in MultiVPS and MultiNAT server families.

The full list for MultiVPS, which is separated between direct templates that you can use immediately with your VPS and preloaded ISO with netboot.xyz for a personalized install, is:

OS Templates

• AlmaLinux 8.9 and 9.2
• Alpine Linux 3.1.9
• CentOS Stream 8 and 9
• CloudLinux 8.8 and 9.2
• Debian 10, 11 and 12
• Fedora 39 
• Fedora Server 40.1
• MicroOS Latest (integrated into OpenSuse menu)
• OpenSuse Leap Latest
• OpenSuse Tumbleweed Latest
• Rocky Linux 8.9 and 9.3
• Tencent OpenCloudOS 8.6 (with Kernel 5.4 LTS) and 9.0 (with Kernel 6.1 LTS), RHEL-based
• Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04 and 24.04 
• Windows Server 2019 and 2022 Evaluation ^1 2  

Via Netboot.xyz

• ArchLinux ³
• Gentoo 
• Kali 
• Slackware 
• Tiny Core Linux ⁴
• others available 

It's a huge variety of operating systems available to you. All OS templates were previously tested on a VPS to ensure them as fully operational.

Bear in mind that our OS templates are mostly updated by SolusVM. As soon as SolusVM launches new templates for their OS templates, we'll ensure you have those available.

¹ Customer needs to bring their own license or, after expiration, Microsoft will shutdown Windows every 60 minutes.
² Server Core is usable for plans with 2-4GB RAM and at least 30GB (ex: CentralVPS-2048). Server with Desktop Experience can only be used on 4GB or more of RAM (ex: ExtraVPS-4096). Not available on plans under 2GB RAM.
³ Arch Linux is provided only for Arch-dependent workloads - while working, it has shown slow disk performance when virtualized over KVM (around 10% of total performance, HDD-equivalent on an NVMe). Proceed with caution.
⁴ This operating system doesn't natively support cloud-init, which is essential for virtualization. It's still possible to use ISOs to deploy local packages. Proceed with caution.

What about the Custom ISOs on MultiVPS?

Due to a lack of that option on our virtualization interface (SolusVM 2.0), we are currently unable to allow for custom ISOs directly via our service.

However, there is one possibility that you can use, since VNC allows for direct access to the GRUB menu. Follow this guide from any Debian/Ubuntu system but, instead of issuing the command

wget https://boot.netboot.xyz/ipxe/netboot.xyz.iso

replace the link above with the direct link to your ISO. (On Amazon AWS links you need to add " " before and after the link)

After that, issue the command

update-grub2

and then, directly from the VNC connection and without closing the window, issue the restart command (shutdown -r now or reboot)

Making a restart directly from SolusVM panel, at any point, causes VNC to lose acesss and you won't have access to GRUB. Restarting by writing the command on the command-line is the only way, currently (as of May 8th, 2024).

In some operating systems, for example Rocky Linux, you'll need to be fast - GRUB only appears for 1 second. In AlmaLinux and Debian however, it appears for a little longer (roughly 3 seconds). Your mileage may vary, depending on which system you've chosen to do this.

If you prefer, before restarting, you can edit the GRUB_TIMEOUT field on /etc/default/grub for your GRUB menu to appear a little longer - simply input a valid, different number of seconds and save the file on your preferred text editor. 

After restarting and seeing the GRUB menu entries, you can select your personalized ISO and proceed with the installation from there. 

Ensure that the relevant packages for your VM are installed - if your system logs some errors, ensure you have cloudinit/v2 packages installed on your personalized VPS.