Goal – An extremely light weight VM that runs VM Tools and a basic http website for testing fail-overs and migrations in a home lab that is crimped on resources.
Alpine Linux VM – runs http and vm tools. 5-23 MB RAM active RAM (out of 256MB) 585MB of storage (out of 1GB)
Side note – Zerto 8.0 will not be able to re-ip the vNIC since the OS is not supported. VMware Cloud Director Availability can.

Download the 41MB ISO. “Current Alpine Version 3.12.0 (Released May 29, 2020)”
https://www.alpinelinux.org/downloads/
Virtual
x86_64
/releases/x86_64/alpine-virt-3.12.0-x86_64.iso

– Linux – Other 4.x or later Linux (64-bit)
– 1 vCPU
– 256 MB Memory (the ISO install will fail with 128 MB. Once installed the OS does boot with 192MB)
– 1GB HDD
– Boot Options Defaults – Firmware – EFI / Secure Boot – NOT enabled

user root, no password
setup-alpine
disk (sda)
sys
Y to format the disk
Shut down the VM once at the command prompt. “poweroff”
On the VM – set the CDROM drive to Client Device and not connected. Otherwise you will boot to the installer again.

Power on the VM

console login as root

Enable SSH
apk add openssh
rc-update add sshd (should already be)
vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
PermitRootLogin yes
wq!
/etc/init.d/sshd restart

SSH in via Putty

apk -U upgrade

edit
/etc/apk/repositories
un-comment (#) the 2nd community repo

apk add open-vm-tools
rc-update add open-vm-tools

apk add lighttpd
rc-update add lighttpd

echo “my alpine vm http page” > /var/www/localhost/htdocs/index.html

reboot -f

You can now see VM tools are running per vCenter and the http (not https) website loads the plain text webpage “my alpine vm http page””
If you need to change the IP address run:
vi /etc/network/interfaces
/etc/init.d/networking restart

References put together:
https://www.virten.net/2016/05/deploy-vmware-nsx-in-homelabs-with-limited-resources/
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Configure_Networking