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,
...
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),
- Operating system upgrade supports transactional upgrade/rollback | Solari Solaris had this from way back.
- Traditional package managers replaced by new simplified systems (Snappy), or custom image builds (Atomic) | Yeah we did the same.
- Security enhanced through isolation.
- systemd for system/service management
- 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 all with ssh server during initial setup. per Bonsai Framework setup instructions (no updates though) and then fresh reboot.
The following commands were used,
| 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 -1l # how many packages installed |
Ubuntu 16.04.1
Running inside of VMWare Fusion. 2GB Memory and 2 CPU's assigned.
| Attribute | Minimal Virtual Machine | Minimal *unchecked standard system utilities | Normal | Recently Ubuntu Snappy 15.04 | Microsoft Azure Default Image |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Packages | 217 |
+ openssh- |
client) |
251 (+ openssh-server) | 223 | 430 [*] standard system utilities selected |
438 (+ openssh-server) | 2 core packages containing minimal utilities | 489 (built with ssh) |
| Memory Used (measured shortly after Initial boot) | 35 MB |
| 62 MB |
| 83 MB |
| 165 MB (this does not look right) | 96 MB |
Tasks (minus 2 to run the commands |
162 | 200
Reduced fat due to uniformity of virtual machines.
Ubuntu 10.04.4
639M
) * System needs time to settle after boot. | Initial boot - 8:00PM | Initial boot - 9:22 176 - 9:45 167 - 10:12 167 - 10:24 | 223 (did not let it settle) Initial Boot - 10:50 | 174 (did not let it settle) | 133 - 2:20 |
| Disk Space Used | 735 MB | 992 MB | 1.3 GB | 639 MB | 1.3 GB |
| 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. |
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