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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?

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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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Might have luck with NanoBSD; it's built off of BSD 8.0 and is what pfSense uses. – gravyface Nov 16 '11 at 12:56
@Chopper3 hmmm... yes, you seem to be right. I guess I'll fire up FreeBSD and see what I'll get. Thanks! – pepoluan Nov 16 '11 at 12:59
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up vote 4 down vote

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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Thanks. Indeed, support is something I must not overlook. @Chopper3 answered first so the checkmark still belongs to him/her, but I'll upvote your answer :) – pepoluan Nov 21 '11 at 10:06
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