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 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 areThis article has now evolved to chart out comparisons on minimizing Ubuntu.

Lab

F4 on the first screen allows selection of,

• Normal
• Install a minimal system
• Install a minimal virtual machine

...

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.

Conceptually this is similar to the Stripped Solaris approach I refined from Tony Bates back in 2008 which he implemented for a major FI with nine-nines of uptime for years. Since 2013 Google and others have taken this idea further (CoreOS, Ubuntu Snappy, Redhat Atomic) with the concept of core operating systems with the key benefits (again some borrowed from Solaris),

1. Operating system upgrade supports transactional upgrade/rollback | Solaris had this from way back.
2. Traditional package managers replaced by new simplified systems (Snappy), or custom image builds (Atomic) | Yeah we did the same.
3. Security enhanced through isolation.
4. systemd for system/service management
5. new (well kinda evolved from distributed computing) - clustering as part of the OS

Results

Here are the differences between a minimal virtual machine, minimal and normal using Ubuntu 10.04.4,

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 per Bonsai Framework setup instructions (no updates though) and then fresh reboot.

The following commands were used,

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 -l # how many packages installed

Ubuntu 16.04.1

Running inside of VMWare Fusion. 2GB Memory and 2 CPU's assigned.

Using the minimal virtual machine install, I did find that I wanted some packages back documented as Recommended Tools in the Bonsai Framework Ubuntu setup process.

Environment

VMWare Fusion wiith 2000GB of Memory and 2 Processors.

References

Provided what the differences between the installs are - http://askubuntu.com/questions/57336/minimal-system-or-minimal-virtual-machine-on-install