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),

1. Operating system upgrade supports transactional upgrade/rollback | Solari 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 all with ssh server during initial setup.After initial setup, let the system settle for 10 minutes (there's some last minute processes) 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 -1l # how many packages installed

Ubuntu 16.04.1

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

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