When using VMware Server 1.x, I’ve encountered a few guest Virtual Machines, VMs, where the clocks do not advance correctly. What is especially frustrating about this is that frequently the clocks in the other guest VM’s on the same host are operating correctly. I’ve not yet determined what causes the inconsistency across the guest VM’s, but overtime, I’ve found a few tricks to work-around this issue.
Trick #1 — Host OS power management may be causing the host to update the clock incorrectly, tell the VMware server software the real clock speed of the cpus by modifying the config.ini.
Add the following entries and restart the vmware authorization server
- host.cpukHz = “30000000″ (this example is for a 3 GHZ system)
- host.noTSC = “TRUE”
- ptsc.noTSC = “TRUE”
On windows the default location of the VMware config.ini is C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware Server
On Linux this file is in /etc/vmware/config
Trick #2 — set the VMware Tools Clock Synchronization to update more frequently by editing the .vmx file and adding
- tools.syncTime = “TRUE”
- tools.syncTime.period = “1″ (this is for a 1 second update)
- timeTracker.periodicStats=”True”
- timeTracker.statsIntercal=”10″
A word of caution, If you use Trick #2 and later you attempt to convert the VMWare Server VM to ESX , then you may have to comment out or remove these items
- tools.syncTime.period
- timeTracker.periodicStats
- timeTracker.statsIntercal
from the .vmx file. At least one version of VMWare converter did not create a VM that I could use in ESX, until I had removed those items prior to running the converter.
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Hi John,
Thanks for the kind remarks.
The images were the default ones from the wordpress theme. I’ve now switched my theme to PrimePress.
Awesome post, I’ve been pulling my hair out over time drift in my Ubuntu VMs. Normally time isn’t an important thing for most of what I do, but I run my MythTV backend in a VM and after upgrading to an i7 processor, my clock was drifting causing me to not record my shows on time. Option 2 was the ticket for me. Thanks a million.