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.