I’m happy to report that CentOS 4.3 appears to run just fine on ESX Server 2.5.3. I built a CentOS server in the lab today for additional testing on the Linux-AD integration instructions with Windows Server 2003 R2, and found that CentOS appears to run just fine.
The virtual machine configuration was specified as a single CPU (I haven’t tested it with Virtual SMP) with the vlance virtual NIC and the LSI Logic SCSI adapter.
In the past I experienced problems with time synchronization inside CentOS when running as a virtual machine (described here and here). As I have not yet had the time to test time synchronization, I don’t know if the problem will crop up again.
