[NBLUG/talk] vmware-server question

[Kyle Rankin]

On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 03:59:58PM -0700, Sean wrote:
> I'm having a problem with a Debian guest OS where the time is
> significantly slower than normal time. I think I have the solution,
> but could anyone confirm that this is all I need to do?
> 
> Edit the guest's .vmx file, and add this line and reboot the guest:
> 
> tools.syncTime = "TRUE"
> 
> Is this it, or should I do anything else? I tried the ntp client, but
> that's not working well enough as the guest can be off by 60 seconds
> in as little as two minutes.
> 
> 
> Thanks!
> 

It's a common problem on VMware with a number of VMs on it. Without getting
into the details of why it happens, yes tools.syncTime is the primary way
of fixing it as it allows vmware tools to take control and sync system time
of a guest to the host time. You don't want to use ntpd as often the skew
goes beyond it. What you do want to do, though, is combine tools.syncTime
with "notsc" as a boot parameter for the VM. Even with that I've noticed
some hosts still skew slightly and I've needed to run ntpdate every hour or
so to fix the slight skew.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org