It's 2012 end of 2011 and virtualization technology is rampant in clouds and admins are choosing to use this optionreally taking off with the concept of clouds. As such, I did an investigation on the exact differences and check if there really are any performance gainsof the Ubuntu installs.
I used these results to end up using "Install a minimal virtual machine" option and have been since Jan 2012 without any issues.
This article has now evolved to chart out comparisons on minimizing Ubuntu.
Lab
F4 on the first screen allows selection of,
...
| Code Block | ||
|---|---|---|
| ||
free -h # how much memory used ps aux | wc -l # how many processes (including the two to run this command) df -h | grep root # how much disk used (not going to bother counting the small 30MB for boot dpkg --get-selections | wc -1 # how many packages installed |
Ubuntu 16.04.1
| Attribute | Minimal Virtual Machine | Minimal | Normal | Recently Ubuntu Snappy 15.04 | Microsoft Azure Default Image |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Packages | 217 |
430 [*] standard system utilities selected | 2 core packages containing minimal utilities | 439 | |
| Memory on Initial Boot | 36 MB |
| 80 MB | 165 MB (this does not look right) | 97 MB | |
| Tasks - 2 to run the commands | 161 |
| 223 (did not let it settle) | 174 (did not let it settle) | 152 (double check this does not look right) | |
| Disk Space | 733 MB |
| 1.3 GB | 639 MB | 1.9 GB (need to double-check this on a fresh install) | ||
| Key Advantage | Reduced fat due to uniformity of virtual machines. | Minimal to run a normal Server. | Already includes popular admin packages. | Upgrade core OS as 1 package and revert btw OS upgrades quickly. Made for pure Cloud. |
References
Provided what the differences between the installs are - http://askubuntu.com/questions/57336/minimal-system-or-minimal-virtual-machine-on-install