Infrastructure Software

I'm posting here rather than under the toolkits because I'm doing my install by hand, trying to tune all parameters to their proper settings (though maybe I should give up and go to the cookbook?)

Does anyone have a white paper on best practices for installing Oracle on an ESX 2.5 Linux guest VM?

I first went with RedHat Enterprise Linux 3, but we ran into severe memory issues. I'm not sure if it's because I made the SGA too big (most of the docs assume that you have 4 GB but of course I only could allocate 3600 MB so I was guessing a little on the max size of the SGA). I also had trouble configuring my Hugepages that Oracle could use them... I don't think I configured them properly. Anyway, our kscand kept going out of control as the machine tried to swap enough memory to handle our load.

I then installed SuSE Enterprise Linux 9 on a separate machine since it's the first 2.6 kernel that ESX supports (as far as I know). I was able to utilize the Hugepages by setting disable_cap_mlock=1, but this time around my CPU was going crazy with high load. I'm wondering if that has to do with the slower vmxbuslogic drive controllers (vmxlsilogic is not supported for SLES9) or if there's some other reason. Our CPU only ran hot on the RHEL3 machine when kscand went out of control.

Any thoughts?