Since building what will be our production server for running production virtual machines, I am experiencing probelms with time synchronisation. Specifically the clocks on Windows 2000 guests are madly gaining time (I havnt tried a linux guest) even though I have vmware tools time synchronisation turned on.
I have looked at the following white paper (http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/resources/238) and specificaly looked at the troubleshooting section but it does not seem to offer any help when the vmware tools sync option isnt working.
Details:
VMWare Server 1.0.1
Host: Fedora Core 4, kernel 2.6.17-1.2142_FC4smp. Running NTP client.
Guest: Windows 2000 SP4 with all current updates
Tools: vmware tools is installed and time synchronisation is enabled.
The Problem:
Dispite having VMWare Tools installed and set to sync the guest time, the time on the guest is racing ahead of the time on the host.
When I reset the clock manually to the correct time, within the first minute its already gained a number of seconds. It races ahead at a rate of about 24 seconds / minute.
I have set
timeTracker.periodicStats = TRUE
timeTracker.statInterval = 10
and monitored the log and this suggests the timer is pretty much ok. The "behind by" value varies between 50000 and -10000 and is always "running at" 100%. Sample extract:
Sep 26 12:12:05: vmx| TimeTrackerStats behind by 60636511 cycles (25265 us); running at 100%; 0 stops, 0 giveups
Sep 26 12:12:05: vmx| TimeTrackerStats CMOS-P 796 ints, 79.60/sec, 79.80 avg, 64.00 req; 164413 tot, 131859 req; 25 loprg, 25 rtry
Sep 26 12:12:05: vmx| TimeTrackerStats timer0 226 ints, 22.60/sec, 22.70 avg, 18.21 req; 46772 tot, 37510 req; 2 loprg, 3 rtry
Sep 26 12:12:05: vmx| TimeTrackerStats PIIX4PMTT 6 ints, 0.60/sec, 0.53 avg, 0.43 req; 1097 tot, 879 req; 0 loprg, 0 rtry
The Windows Time service is set to Manual and NOT running. net time /queryconfig says its not configured. The VMware Tools Service is Started. I get the same problem on a number of guest installations (all Win2ksp4) all advancing at a similar rate and all running vmware tools with time sync enabled.
The clock is correct at initial boot up of the VM by the looks of it, its a minute or so ahead of time by the time I get to log in.
I didnt have this problem on our test server which was running FC4 (basically the same host O/S) and the various beta's of VMware Server.
Why is it gaining time so much in the first place ?
And probably more importantly why isn't VMware Tools correcting the time when the option is set and the host o/s has the correct time?
Is there a way to debug what VMware Tools is (or isnt) doing?