I had to build a minimal centos 4.4 vmware image recently. Two projects I'm working on use centos because our team systems administrator is an RHCE, so he uses a familiar distribution. I don't much care which distribution I use. CentOS is fine as long as I can get reasonably new versions of the software I require (php, postgresql).
In fact CentOS 4.4 isn't that distribution, with php stuck at somewhere around 4.3 and postgresql at 7.4. But it's certainly stable. And I can build any necessary software from source, so I don't feel any great need to upgrade to 5 (although we should probably have a plan for that upgrade path for sometime in the next 6 months).
For this distribution, I had to install Oracle 10g Express Edition (for learning Oracle, and for prototyping). That makes the installed VM bloat up by a lot. I went through the installed RPMs and removed everything I didn't think I'd need (and a few things that I found I needed later on). Later, I had to reinstall some development packages since I needed to build php from source (because I couldn't figure out how to get CentOS' built-in php to talk to oracle). I eventually wound up installing php 5.3.2 since I couldn't get php 4.3.9 to do what I wanted (connect to oracle). That's probably pilot error, but I don't mind the upgrade, and if there are incompatibilities with the installed php 4.3.9 on the deployed live servers, well, I'll ask the team sysad to deploy 5.3.2 there (after some paranoid testing on the vmware image).
After building php, I removed the development packages again :-). For when I need the list again:
gcc apr-devel gcc-c++ libtool bison flex make
autoconf automake cpp db4-devel apr-devel
glibc-devel glibc-headers apr-util-devel
httpd-devel libstdc++-devel openldap-devel
openssl-devel pcre-devel postgresql-devel
zlib-devel libpng-devel libxml2-devel
The vmware image we use doesn't have any X anything in there except what is needed for vmware-toolbox (useful for resizing). I thought that I absolutely needed to have X actually running in the VM. That may have been true with older versions of vmware, but with the free vmware-server, I can safely do X11 forwarding over ssh and do the vmware-toolbox resizing using the X on the host. No need to have gnome and all the rest of the packages it pulls in just for resizing the vmware virtual drives.
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