@ajstringham said:
I'm creating the VMDK now. My only concern is that, all my research suggests Ubuntu is the best distro to run a LAMP server on. I'm also much more familiar with Debian systems over RPM...
RHEL has always been the LAMP leader. No upside to Ubuntu for LAMP. That's not where Ubuntu is strong. Ubuntu is better for alternative, non-LAMP, application stacks like RoR and Node.js where RHEL's conservative approach is a major problem.
Other than needing the EPEL enabled, RHEL is as straightforward as you really get for LAMP. Ubuntu has only squeaked by as being even a reasonable choice until the latest few releases.