Has anyone had success with bodhi as a vmware host? In theory it should leave plenty of ram free for virtual machines, but is that so once vmware has been installed?

How much memory is available for VMs?

How fast are VM's running inside this host, as opposed to a standard ubuntu host?

Bodhi 1.0.0 runs kernel 2.6.35 and Ubuntu 11.04 runs kernel 2.6.38 so unless Linux' Virtual Memory Management (VMM) or performance increased astronomically between minor versions (fat chance) things like hardware, configuration, bloat, lag, matching VM guests purpose with the right virtualization product are bound to have a greater effect on things IMHO.

How should the install of VMware affect the amount of free RAM significantly? You will have a real little loss of RAM because of a loaded kernel module, but other than that I doubt that it will do much to your RAM.

I think that the performance of a VM is at first dependent on the underlying hardware, second on the VM software itself, and third on the used host OS, but I doubt that an Ubuntu derivate will be slower than Ubuntu itself. I would rather think that Bodhi should be faster than a (standard) Ubuntu installation, because it lacks many of the background processes of standard Ubuntu.

If you want the maximum performance for the host OS, get rid of all that is not necessary. Choose your favorite distro (I personnaly would go for Debian, Arch or Slackware), install just a base system, than only Xorg, a lightweight WM (Openbox, Fluxbox, IceWM, ...) and VMware (Virtualbox, Qemu). That should give you the maximum achievable performance.

It runs some five or six services afaik.

Sure, but these two cannot be changed easily, only one pc is available and too many vmware VM's would have to be converted if vmware is abandoned.

Have bad experience out of this. There are undeclared dependencies in ubuntu that can almost wreck your system if you remove certain packages. Don't ask me to reproduce the errors, just allow me to rather start from something very minimal that someone else has optimally prepared as a minimal desktop, and add only vmware and essential packages to it.

I think you have misread my post. I didn't talk about removing packages from an full install, I talked about adding packages to a minimal install. Ubuntu, Debian and Arch will automatically pull in all needed dependencies, this way you can't break the system. Only in Slackware you will have to do dependency management yourself.

Indeed I misread you. For the record, one example of error that proved the existence of undeclared dependencies was something related to "human theme" or something else "human".