i have had a number of problems running oracle linux 5 & 6 as a vmware guest and just solved most of them by
making sure
eth0 onstartup = true
and
using standard redhat kernel instead of the (default) oracle UEK (32bit and 64bit)
ps the latter also lets me run the google chrome browser in my oracle linux 6 vm
are there any other gotchas for creating and running oracle linux vms ?