I've run across a bugger of a problem that has us stumped. First, some background information.
We have a vCenter 5.0 installation with several clusters in place. The cluster for this question has 11 hosts and 203 VMs. We use Veeam to replicate a small percentage of the VMs to a different location (different cluster). We're currently on Veeam 6.5.
Lately, we've been having some performance issues with our vCenter server. Mostly during the backups (we use Avamar) the vCenter server will experience extreme performance issues and will essentially time out all connections. If we happen to be in the middle of a Veeam replication job when vCenter times out, that will orhpan the snapshot that Veeam created and we'll have to manually remove that snapshot.
Here's the kicker, while that snapshot is in place, twice a day we'll get entries in the Windows Security Logs (for the VM that was being replicated) that VMTOOLSD.EXE has updated the system time. Once we remove that snapshot (or snapshots) we no longer get any of the log entries about VMTOOLSD.EXE changing the system time. We have verified that the Guest option to sync time with the host is NOT enabled.
I can't say for certain that these two events are necessarily related but we've had three servers show these symptoms so far and all three were "fixed" by deleting the orphaned Veeam snapshot. To me, that's too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence even if I can't see a logical link between the two items.
Has anyone else seen anything like this or can anyone help me figure out what the link is between the two?
