Saw this question and it got me thinking: Is it possible/advisable to run VMware Server ESX/ESXi on a laptop?
Clearly running ESX directly on the laptop metal is not going to work, however I find I do most of my work inside VMWare Workstation and ideally I'd like my base OS to use as little cpu/ram/disk io as possible so my VMs can perform better.
I have found things like TinyXP that would suit me – unfortunetely this is not really legal.
Is there any recommended linux distro with this sort of application in mind? Or can I strip Win7 down to the bones? Win Server 2003/2008 worth looking at?
64 bit would be nice but I'm not sure its essential.
edit: my VMs are mainly windows with and the odd linux 'development appliance' preloaded with LAMP or similar.
Best Answer
I've run Win Server 2008 R2 on a laptop for exactly this purpose before, and it worked fine. Just be sure you mean it when you say that this laptop is "just for" running VMs, because once Hyper-V is enabled, the audio and graphics performance on the parent partition's local console will pretty much suck.
With pretty much everything but Hyper-V turned off, the OS only used about 512MB of RAM (on average). The forthcoming Dynamic Memory feature in SP1 will make scenarios like this even more feasible, as they allow you to oversubscribe the host's RAM and squeeze more VMs onto the laptop.
In my experience, the real performance bottleneck for VMs on laptops isn't the hypervisor -- it's the disk drive. Storing your VMs on an external hard drive is a good way to both improve performance and make your VMs easily portable between machines.
Hope this helps!