Is Administering XenServer like administering CentOS?

Keep in mind that the OS is stripped even if based on a release, as if the gear is in the HCL, you will mostly never use any OS command.

Most command you will ever use to administer it would be in the xe commandset:

• xe task-list
• xe task-cancel
• xe toolstack-restart
• etc...

OS update all got installed and detected via the xenserver console too.. thus, most command are the xen command.

Only time I entered general command on the host was to install the dell openmanage package and a monitoring agent.

Primarily, you are committing to work in the XenServer way. This product is essentially an appliance and most of the things that are different between Debian and CentOS are hidden from you anyway or are better maintained by the tools XenServer offers you.

You can easily test this, setting up a test VM with XenServer is easy (yes, it runs inside a VM).

I work with Xenserver almost every day. In a simple server or small pool there would be very little need to interact with the underlying OS ever, which is the point.

But we have 60+ xenservers and we have historically used Salt to push out changes sitewide, like "someone's left, change all the root passwords and all the DRAC passwords" or update DNS servers, or simply append a search domain to resolv.conf or to install dell's opemnamage hardware monitoring, or simple stuff like the latest checkmk agent.

In 6.5 this worked well despite being officially unsupported.

In 7.0 the RPMs are not available and installing the salt RPM simply complains about missing dependencies.

So to answer your question, No, administering xenserver is like administering an appliance as long as you don't do anything weird