This guest operating system is supported on the following VMware products:
Be sure to read General Guidelines for All VMware Products as well as this guide to installing your specific guest operating system.
The easiest method of installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 in a virtual machine is to use the standard Red Hat distribution CD. The notes below describe an installation using the standard distribution CD; however, installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 via the boot floppy/network method is supported as well. If your VMware product supports it, you may also install from a PXE server.
Before installing the operating system, be sure that you have already created and configured a new virtual machine.
Note: Be sure the virtual machine is configured with at least 256MB of memory. If the virtual machine has less than 256MB of memory, Red Hat Enterprise Linux presents an error message as it loads certain VMware drivers.
Note: Pay particular attention to the notes in step 6 about how to avoid installing an inappropriate kernel.
You need to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 using the text mode installer, which you may choose when you first boot the installer. At the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 CD boot prompt, you are offered a number of choices, including the following:
To install or upgrade Red Hat Linux ... in graphical mode ...
To install or upgrade ... in text mode, type: text <ENTER>...
...
Use the function keys listed below ...
To choose the text mode installer, type text and press Enter.
This completes basic installation of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 guest operating system.
Be sure to install VMware Tools in your guest operating system. For details, see the manual for your VMware product or follow the appropriate link in the knowledge base article at www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=340.
Do not start the X server in the guest operating system until you install VMware Tools.
VMware GSX Server: The sound device is disabled by default and must be enabled with the virtual machine control panel (VM > Settings) after the operating system has been installed. To set up the virtual machine to play sound, see Configuring Sound in the GSX Server documentation.
VMware GSX Server: On a Linux host with an XFree86 3.x X server, it is best not to run a screen saver in the guest operating system. Guest screen savers that demand a lot of processing power can cause the X server on the host to freeze.
VMware GSX Server: VMware recommends you do not migrate a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 virtual machine between hosts when one host is running on an AMD processor and the other is running on an Intel processor.
During installation, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 chooses a kernel that is optimized for the specific processor on which it is running. The kernel may contain instructions that are available only on that processor. These instructions can have adverse effects when run on a host with the wrong type of processor.
Thus, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 virtual machine created on a host with an AMD processor may not work if migrated to a host with an Intel processor. The reverse is also true: a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 virtual machine created on a host with an Intel processor may not work if migrated to a host with an AMD processor.
This problem is not specific to virtual machines and would also occur on physical computers. For example, if you moved a hard drive with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 installation from an AMD machine to an Intel machine, you would experience problems trying to boot from that drive.
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