I have a new skinny linux distribution available on my site. I’m not the author of this release, but a colleague of mine Doug Baer orginally put it together. It’s used primarily in our hands-on-lab environment where you need some small VMs to run on top of nested vESX environment. These nested VMs that run within the content of vESX environment are sometime referred to as vVMs. This whole configuration where a physical system (Workstation, Fusion, pESX) runs VMware ESX in a VM has been dubbed by some in the community as “vInception:
These skinny linux distro uses MicroCore Linux and has VMware Tools installed using the “open source” edition which means its re-distributable in this manner. The environment is non-persistent except for /home and /opt.
I’ve taken this VM and created a .OVA for you download – and you might find it useful in your home lab where memory resources are limited.
The VM has 1xVCPU, 64MB RAM and it has single 1GB Virtual Disk that is thinly provisioned – this VM is available in the download section of my site.