Regarding your project page, just a minor comment about your statement
about Centos (and other O/S that will give the same impression)
"Recommended disk size and packaging creates a small OS image in zipped
format (something like 3-400 Mb), but actual virtual disk inside tar/zip
file is huge (10Gb) and results in loooooong unpacking times"
This is not necessarily correct. The typical Centos VM disk image is 4Gb
most of which is empty space. In my experiments with Centos and SER this
could be reduced to 2Gb without problems. In fact my current Centos
systems need around 500Mb plus data space.
Also, when the image is correctly constructed (empty disk space set to
zero) the image can be very rapidly expanded. If you have a downloaded
VMware image that expands to 10Gb and takes a long time then it is a
problem for the person who generated it rather than the VMWare system.
Thanks, Jeremy. That has also been my previous experience, but I
thought there was some special virtual appliance requirement. Thanks
for enlightening me about zero-filled space, I actually thought that
was the default. I'll disregard the example virtual appliance I tested
and I have updated the project page.
I recommend that you generate a custom VMWare image (or get a more
efficient image to modify). You could start at 4Gb but perhaps 2Gb will
be sufficient as SER is not very demanding on most resources. I guess
you will need Apache, Bind, php, MySql etc. These do not take up a lot
of space.
If the compressed download is small, I'm not too worried about the
resulting size. It should be large enough for a production install. We
will probably have to experiment a bit.