I personally suggest either a minimal but stable Linux host OS or windows 2000 server host OS, since both have relatively little resource overhead. I'm not too familiar with running vmware on linux hosts myself -- it's very much a matter of preference.

Alvin,

What did you install for a base image of Centos? I'm curious as to what the minimum config would be for a Linux VMware Host.

Thanks!
mike

Wow, that's tiny. Thanks so much for posting this. I'm off to give it a try. Win2k3 for a host on a laptop is killing me!

I'm assuming that without X running, you must get to the guest via the client interface from another system?

thanks again,
mike

That's really more a religious discussion than anything else:-). I'm familiar with both Linux and Windows and I would pick Linux because of the control you have over running services, kernel configuration, etc. In Linux you can re-compile your kernel and strip out the things you don't really want (assuming your comfortable with that), disable many services, and disable your X server altogether resulting in a fairly low overhead. With Windows you can strip down some of the services, disable the gratuitous animation and themes, resulting in relatively low overhead, as well, but (IMHO) not to the same extent as with Linux.

I'm not sure what VMware claims are the officially supported O/S's, but I think it'll run on most of the major ones. I know it runs on OpenSUSE and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, and on the various RHEL versions. I think Fedora Core would work fine, too.