To install CentOS Linux Server carry out the following steps:

Once the installation process has been completed, we need to adjust some settings to ensure that our PHP environment is properly configured and at the right version level.

If you recall from earlier in this section, Version 5.4 of CentOS includes Version 5.1.6 of PHP, which should not be used with versions of SugarCRM newer than 5.2. There is no need to worry, however, as step-by-step instructions for installing an updated version of PHP are available at the following URL:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/PHP_5.1_To_5.2

You may have noticed that the images were taken from an installation being performed on a Sun VirtualBox virtual machine. A virtual machine is precisely that, a digital representation of a physical server. VirtualBox is one of various software packages available today that provides this type of increasingly popular functionality.

The popularity of virtualization is primarily due to its ability to reduce costs. As a single physical server can be used to host multiple virtual machines, each performing different functions, hardware and other ancillary costs (such as electricity) are reduced. The danger, however, is that a major failure on the physical server has the potential to impact all the virtual machines it is hosting—this poses a bit of a risk.

If you are considering using virtualization technology for your SugarCRM deployment, either for the web or database server component, rest assured that it is a perfectly acceptable (and common) approach to deploying it, especially when using Linux.

Let us now proceed to configure our newly installed CentOS system to prepare it to host a SugarCRM installation.