Hi Guys,
I'm in the process of setting up a 2-node RHEL 6.1 cluster to do a proof-of-concept for Oracle on Linux. Last night, standing in the freezing datacenter I was disappointed to learn that the hardware at my disposal (IBM eServer x366) is not compatible with RHEL 6.1.

So, I'm thinking of creating this setup on my Windows box as a virtual environment. Since VMWare does not come free, I was hoping to learn what options are at my disposal to achieve this.

Vmware server IS free.

I would really be sure RHEL would work OK on that box though.

Hi Chris,
What made me to think on the contrary was as I began the installation on one of the boxes, after having passed the initial welcome screen and selected to install, I received a black screen with an active mouse pointer. Going to the other terminal I could see that my enter keystrokes were doing stuffs like selcting language, etc. But I could see none of those activities in the GUI.

Then I opted for 'linux text', did the complete installation and was unable to issue 'startx'. All this made me to dig through the compatibility and I found that the model was not listed there.

Thanks for the VMWare info though. Trying to set it up now.

I'm sure you could get X working, but in general a server should not run X anyway. I would personally install nx on it and get a graphical display remotely IF i were to need one.

Any particular reason why you'd not want GUI to run on the server? And what was the 'nx' you were referring to?

it's more software, it's more memory and RAM usage, it's more possible instability and security issues.

Just google for NX, it's like VNC but not awful.

x366 is not very new, but should be able to run RHEL6 just fine, given the right specs.

Still, the X issue should be resolvable, and as it was mentioned earlier - there's no reason to run X on a server machine, unless X is required as a server specific service.