I have always been a fan of stripped down "just what you need" OS installations of Windows and Linux. Which is why we use nLite for creating custom XP builds and gentoo for general purpose linux machines. For Oracle applications we use a base installation of Oracle Enterprise Linux.

The advantage of a these minimal builds are: 

• Better Performance
• Smaller Footprint
• More secure (in theory)

This has worked well for us - our hosted instances boot in a minute or less.