Opreport or oprofile not working in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5/6 guest running on VMware

Issue

• opreport and oprofile are not working in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5/6 guest running on VMware.
• When using ESXi 5.1, oprofile inside the VM works with the virtualized performance counters, but it dumps core frequently. Core files in /var/lib/oprofile.

# opcontrol --start --vmlinux=/usr/lib/debug/lib/modules/2.6.18-164.el5/vmlinux --separate=library  
Using default event: CPU\_CLK\_UNHALTED:100000:0:1:1  
Using 2.6+ OProfile kernel interface.  
Reading module info.  
Using log file /var/lib/oprofile/samples/oprofiled.log  
Daemon started.  
Profiler running.  

# opcontrol --shutdown  
sh-3.2\# opcontrol --shutdown  
Stopping profiling.  
Killing daemon.  

# opreport --long-filenames  
opreport error: No sample file found: try running opcontrol --dump