Trying VMware image of Oracle 10gR2 on RedHat Linux (RHEL4)

My goal is to run Oracle 10gR2 in a VMware session. This allows me to do whatever I want on the OS and on the database. I will mainly use it as a testing/playing environment as I try a lot of new (beta) things, apply patches and do a lot of demos and POCs. VMware allows me to reverse the image/snapshot as much as I like.

This week-end I thought to try it again! Previous times it worked, but too slow, now I've a new laptop (Dell Inspiron 9300), so I'm more hopefull. My thoughts...

The installation:
You've the choice to install a VMware with as OS; Redhat or Novell. I chose for Redhat (RHEL4). You need to download three zip files from OTN and an additional download on the Redhat site. You also need to do some registration to get a trail key. The links to download are in this url: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/linux/vmware/index.html as also a detailed readme about the installation. It takes some time to download as it's a bit more than 4GB!

Once downloaded you need to unzip all files in the same directory! I did a mistake here, by using different directories, which caused the installation to fail (didn't find the right files).

You run the installer, and he does all the work. I used everywhere the default settings and it worked perfectly.

The VMware environment:
Oracle delivers a nice package in this VMware image. I got Oracle 10gR2, JDeveloper 10g, HTMLDB 1.6, OWB 10g, RAC, Migration Workbench and some others. It needs to be said that these versions are not the latests one. Today there're already some patches for the database and JDev, HTMLDB and the others have also a more recent version. But nevertheless it's nice to have all this, without doing any installation or configuration.

Performance:
I'm not satisfied with the first tests. I've certainly a lack of memory in my laptop (only 1GB), but there's also something strang happening with the consumption of memory of VMware (it sometimes swaps from 300MB to 50MB etc.).
I found some performance improvements on the KB of vmware.com and at first sight it's getting better.
Tomorrow I will post these improvements and I will do some indepth testing of the RAC database...