Thin Linux Distro suitable for VMware of Linux and Windows 7 / 10

Jane33

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I have a limited hardware platform (64 bit but only 4gb ram (maybe 8gb if I can find upgrade on ebay), storage is split between a 128gb SSD and a 500gb HD.

I will use for testing out software on other OS's in VMware

I want the base OS host to be a super thin Linux Distro where I will do very little except run VMware (I have no choice over this as I will be provided pre-built Win builds)

I will also be using to compare different Linux Distro's in VMware.

For this post all I am after is recommendations on the base OS that will host VMware, I want this is to be super low on overhead so that VMware testing runs as fast as possible.

Thanks in advance.
 


You're going to have a bad time with trying to use VMs with 4 GB (in my experience). It will also depend some on your CPU and what extensions it has for virtualization.

Anyhow, you'll want a light/mainstream distro that can have VMWare installed on it. VMWare releases their Linux stuff in .bundle format, so I'm not sure which OSes they'll work on - but it works on any mainstream distro I'm sure.

Maybe Debian, a community spin with a light desktop environment? Maybe Mint with Xfce? Maybe Lubuntu with LXQt? Xubuntu can be had in a nice LTS with Xfce.

If you want to get creative, get an Ubuntu LTS server .iso and then add just the desktop items you want/need.
 
You're going to have a bad time with trying to use VMs with 4 GB (in my experience). It will also depend some on your CPU and what extensions it has for virtualization.
At work our virtualization solution is vmware/esx and our most average Linux servers function as a webserver and run just fine with 2G of ram so it just depends on the situation.
 
Well, they're virtualizing Windows and evaluating distros. You can squish a server down pretty small, but probably not so with Windows. I fit many of my sites into just 256 MB of RAM (or maybe 512). That's gonna bog something fierce methinks. Maybe the distros they evaluate will be servers, but this seems a strange way to do that.
 

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