Syncing time in a vmware guest can be a problem.

- disable speedstep in the host bios. VM's do not really like a variable 
cpu clock speed on the host

- to enable time syncing in a linux VM after installing the vmware 
tools, you must edit the .vmx file *on the host* and add a line

tools.syncTime = "TRUE" . The guest tools installer does not do this.

Note that the vmware tools will sync with the host clock every minute, 
but will only correct the time if the guest clock is behind.

- look out with timezone settings. AFAIK is will sync with the host 
software clock, which will include time zone corrections even when the 
host hardware clock is set to UTC.

Roelof

Valery Mitsyn wrote:

> On Thu, 31 Jul 2008, A.K.Srikanth wrote:
>
>> All,
>> I have SL 4.4 on a Virtual Machine running on Windows 2003 as the 
>> host OS and I have the infamous clock skew problem. The clock drifts 
>> and drifts on the VM..... and NTP wont work. This is a well known 
>> problem with Redhat and requires that the Vmware tools be installed 
>> and run.
>
> If you updated kernel to the latest 2.6.9-78.EL,
> there is the boot parameter "divider" which may help
> a guest to solve ntpd problem. Just add to grub.conf "divider=10",
> like below:
> kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-78.ELsmp ro root=/dev/md0 divider=10
> and you guest will run w/ 100Hz clock instead of 1000Hz.
>
>>
>> The problem is that I cant use Redhat compiled version of Vmware 
>> tools on SL and because my VM was highly stripped down, the SL 4.4 
>> does not have any compilers etc. Before I have to go and 
>> painstakingly start installing all the tools needed to compile, I 
>> wanted to see if any of you had a precompiled version of _*VMWARE 
>> tools for SL 4.4*_. If you are willing to share, please let me know
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Sri
>>
>