I’m going to create another VM in my server at home to test out OH2, and was curious what people liked for an OS?
I used Ubuntu Server now OH1. Continue with that? Maybe a lightweight Turnkeylinux distro? Or any flavor of windows?
As OpenHAB runs inside the Java Virtual Machine - it works well on any Operating system which supports this JVM in the given Version.
You can use the smallest OS you can find - or completely omit the VM, because Java already is a VM. It runs just fine on a Raspberry 2 for examples. I’m using the heavy Raspbian Debian distro. You could also use a small archlinux setup, but it doesn’t really matter here.
To conclude for your specific question: Just put OpenHAB 2 into another folder, use a different port and it will run just fine.