Vmware or Xen?
 

Hey all,

Im looking to use my dual cpu server a little more then 5% average cpu usage so im thinking of vming the currently running windows OS and install an os and putting vmware on top of it.


My only requirements are that the base OS be small and still support vmware (free)

What distrots are you using under your vmware?

Can you all recommend a small distro that will be able to handle the requirements of Vmware and still be very small (small as in cpu usage, ram usage, and hard drive space)?

You might also want to consider virtualbox its put out by Sun Microsystems and has a free version. I've run both vmware and virtualbox and slightly prefer virtualbox mostly because it was way easier to install, whereas vmware can be a pain if you aren't using a supported kernel (either patching it or finding a vmware-any-any that works for you). In both I've run windows xp and vista with no problems and several different linux distros. Virtualbox can use vmware drive images. Though I don't know if virtualbox supports auto starting virtual machines like vmware does (at least in the vmware server (still free) version).

Since your putting this on a server, pretty much any minimal server install from any distro will meet your criteria of small in cpu/ram/hd space. If you want to have 64bit client OSes you'll need to run a 64bit OS for the server.

so i guess the question now is what is the distro with the smallest min install?

This is sort of incomprehensible. Do you want to run VMware on top of Windows? Do you want to run Windows inside of VMware? Do you want to run VMware on Windows with another Windows VM inside of it??? It would help if you organized your thoughts a little better so people could tell what you're getting at.

As near as I can tell (and this could be completely wrong), you want to run Windows inside a VM, and have the VM running on Linux.

In that case, you could run any number of distros... I've run VMware Server it on SuSE EL, Oracle EL, and CentOS. At the time I ran on SuSE, it was 1.0.x... I had some trouble upgrading at one point and it appeared to be SuSE-specific. On Oracle EL the install was totally smooth, but the performance on VMware2 beta2 was terrible. I tweaked a whole bunch of virtual memory settings and managed to improve things a little, but it's still sluggish. Our QA department has tested VMware Server2 on CentOS 5.1 and they said it ran great. They haven't had any performance problems at all.

I'd recommend CentOS if I had to pick just one today.

By the way, if you run Windows as a VM, you won't have the same video features. VMware's virtual video card doesn't present all the shaders and other bells and whistles that your actual video card has, so if you want to play games or use graphics-intense applications in Windows, running it inside VMware is not a good choice.

Why would you ever want to run a game inside a VM?

"Im looking to use my dual cpu server a little more then 5% average cpu usage so im thinking of vming the currently running windows OS and install an os and putting vmware on top of it."

I thought my question was 98% clear... but lets break it down.

"Im looking to use my dual cpu server a little more then 5% average cpu usage" -- Means Im looking to use my dual cpu server a little more then 5% average cpu usage

"so im thinking of vming the currently running windows OS" -- Means I'm going to run P2v (that's physical to virtual) assistant on the windows server, to get it ready for vmware.

"and install an os and putting vmware on top of it" -- Means, Now that I have a nice little server that has NO OS on it (because I just vm-ed it)... Im going to install a linux distro (looking for the smallest.. hence the other questions in this post) on that server, and install Vmware on top of that Os.

So I already answered your question. BTW you shouldn't be looking for the smallest footprint necessarily, but rather the best performance with VMware. Even distributions that claim they're the same (RHEL, OEL, CentOS) use different compiler flags and thus get very different results in some cases. For instance in my experience, OEL 5.1 had terrible performance, but CentOS 5.1 was fine.