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I am trying to use virutal machines as main systems. So I want a to run the vmware on the lightest or the least resource consuming OS, that is capable of running VMware.

Which one is it?

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Any particular reason to not use any of the all-in-one VMware products? – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Jul 17 '11 at 7:21
@Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams, I would love to. if I had proper knowledge or guidance about them. Would you brief me a little bit? – Starx Jul 17 '11 at 7:39
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Running the VMware ESXi hypervisor, as Ignacio suggested, would probably be best. If you are not sure whether your hardware is compatible, you can install and run ESXi on a USB memory stick (our main HP servers run it this way) so you don't have to commit to erasing anything already on your hard disk. Setting up and managing VMs on ESXi is very straightforward - once the server is setup, you connected to its interface using a web browser and download the management tool to install on your client PC - and that's the important thing to know, with ESXi, the server is dedicated to VMware. – Linker3000 Jul 17 '11 at 8:40

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It would have to be a Linux OS running XWindows and the minimum of installed packages. You could go with mandrake , redhat or suse.

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You still left me with 3 choices. Which one is the lightest? – Starx Jul 17 '11 at 7:56
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My bet would be netBSD.

The minimal configuration for a NetBSD/i386 system requires 4M of RAM and about 40M of disk space. For a full installation (including source and X11), at least 8M of RAM and 200M of disk space are recommended.

UPD: While betbsd is probably lightest free unix I would be careful with this choice. Setup and maintenance of netbsd may appear to be tricky even if you have experience with Linux. Honestly I would choose Linux for this task even if it will consume a bit more resources.

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Does netBSD run, VMware – Starx Jul 17 '11 at 9:30
It looks like yes, you can – Anton Barkovsky Jul 17 '11 at 9:46
I tried it, but couldn't. Can you tell me or point me any specific guide for installing vmware in netbsd – Starx Jul 21 '11 at 10:50

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