I'll just note these two partially related points:
Debian can install and boot in 32 MB of RAM. This is very useful for
virtualization, since the number of virtual machines you can run is
often a simple function:
total_VMs = total_RAM / RAM_required_by_each_VM
The libguestfs appliance needs to boot up in 5 seconds, and consume
the minimum amount of disk and memory possible. (Currently it boots
in 12 seconds, consumes 70 MB of disk, and up to 500 MB of RAM).
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming blog:
http://rwmj.wordpress.com
Fedora now supports 80 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#)
http://cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora