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Accepted
pepoluan
Asked: 2011-11-17 04:42:13 +0800 CST

Which BSD best suited to run as VMware guest?

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I want to deploy a VM to serve DNS and files (via NFS) to other *nix systems in my infrastructure.

Due to reasons beyond my control, I need a very light OS, so I naturally choose the *BSD family.

Can you recommend which *BSD is the best VMware guest?

freebsd openbsd vmware-vsphere bsd netbsd

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Well vSphere 4.x only supports FreeBSD 6.x-8.x while vSphere 5.x also supports Mac OSX 10.6-10.7 - so one of those, anything else isn't supported.

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  2. From practical experience I can tell you all of the Big 3 BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD) will run in VMWare, but as Chopper3 said, only FreeBSD and Apple's OS X (Mach/BSD Hybrid) are officially supported by VMWare.

    If this is going to be a production system and support from the VMWare folks is important to you I would stick to a stripped-down version FreeBSD -- If you only start the services you need and zealously defend against feature creep it should work fine.

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