Brandon - I'm curious what issue you ran into with a 32-bit OEL4 guest on ESX was - mind sharing? Bort - I run a number of Oracle 9, 10, and 11 databases on RHEL 4 and 5 (32-bit) and at the end of the year I should be done virtualizing every one of them (VMWare ESX for all of them). There are some basic changes / parameters to verify but otherwise I haven't seen any issues with VMWare under I/O stress - I'm run some of these DBs on standalone ESX servers and some connected to a EMC CX3 array. In no case have I had an issue where the VM "just dies". Using ESX 3.0.2 or 3.5 Upd 1. As far as the basic changes / parameters to verify grub.conf - elevator=deadline, divider = 10 init.ora - filesystemio_options=SetAll (note that you may need to verify aio rpm if using RHEL/OEL 4) cache as much in the DB - i.e. make SGA as large as your VM memory allows - leave little to no memory to guest OS to cache the usual RAID 10/5 for data, RAID 1 for logs VMFS works fine hugepages That's all that comes to mind at the moment. Feel free to email me backchannel with any specific questions. J -- Jay Weinshenker jweinshe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l