What are your recommendations for a good host OS for running and using VMs on the same machine. I won't be using the host OS for anything other than hosting virtual machines. vSphere would be ideal, but as I understand you cannot sign into them from the same machine (you have to remote in via vSphere Client).
I'm assuming some strain of Linux?
Thanks in advance!
If you don't intend to use the host OS for anything why use Workstation at all? just use the free version of ESXi, you'll get faster performance and fit more VMs into the same memory.
It doesn't really matter which distro you use, but rather how it's configured. You can take a default Ubuntu distro & turn a lot of things off & it'll be pretty lightweight. If I recall correctly, I remember seeing Ubuntu server's default install taking up only 120MB RAM, so you could start with that & add a lightweight window manager such as Blackbox & you'd have a pretty good hypervisor that way.
I did a similar setup recently with Virtualbox & it ran great.
BTW, shouldn't this be on Superuser?