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It's 2012 and virtualization technology is rampant in clouds and admins are choosing to use this option. As such,
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I did an investigation on the exact differences and check if there really are any performance gains.
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I used these results to end up using the "Install a minimal virtual machine" option and have been since Jan 2012 without any issues.
Lab
I just setup two vms (one optimized the other not) using 10.04.4 in Parallels to investigate.
At least as early as Ubuntu 8 (I'm not 100% sure), the Ubuntu installation there allows the administrator to use F4 and select from a number of options some of which are,
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So in theory, the minimal virtual machine option should be used if you are using virtualization technology. The gains would be a faster kernel without the bloat of consideration for many types of drivers. This is because the hardware list in virtual machines is much smaller.
Differences
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Results
Here are the differences between a minimal virtual machine, minimal and normal using Ubuntu 10.04.4,
| Criteria | Minimal Virtual Machine | Minimal | Normal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Packages | 213 |
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| Tasks |
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| 84 |
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| 85 |
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| 87 | |
| Memory |
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| on Initial Boot | 73,980k |
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| 86,584k |
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| 171,392k | |
| Disk Space | 557M |
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| 791M |
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| 851M |
References
Provided what the differences between the installs are - http://askubuntu.com/questions/57336/minimal-system-or-minimal-virtual-machine-on-install