For anyone who is interested in my Redhat/VMware/iSCSI woes, here’s an update.  Jason and I were looking at requirements for VMware ESX and it mentioned that RHEL v4’s iSCSI initiator software was not on the approved list.  RHEL v3 was on the list.  I leveled the box and installed v3.  An amazing thing happened.  It just worked!  I don’t know what this means exactly.  On the surface, it points to me that there is a kernel memory issue with RHEL v4, iSCSI, and the VMware disk creating process.  I know that this process is CPU intensive but why would v4 handle it better than v3?