Time synchronization in linux server guest VM

[Infusion]

How does one activate "time synchronization" on a linux (Ubuntu 6.06) server guest VM when X is not installed?

With a linux (Ubuntu 6.06) desktop VM you can select "time synchronization" by running the vmware-toolbox application. This keeps the guest system clock locked to the host clock at all times.

The problem is that the server guest machine system clock drifts and only locks at power up or after coming out of the suspended state. Thereafter the server guest clock begins to drifts by a substantial amount of many minutes after only a short period of time.

I have VMware Tools installed in the server guest VM and the boot sequence shows the VMware Tools services get loaded.

[admin · Accepted solution]

From the Workstation 6 manual[/url] (page 144-145), the command is

vmware-guestd --cmd "vmx.set_option synctime 0 1"[/code]

From the manual, however, all this does is add

tools.syncTime = "TRUE"[/code]

to the .vmx, which may be an easier way to do what you want.

[arang]

As well as adding the

tools.syncTime="YES"

line to the .vmx file, I also found that I had to add

clock=pit noapic nolapic

to the Linux kernel boot options.

Once I had done that, and installed the vmware tools, my Linux clients kept time very well.

[mykmelez]

I used to use the clock=pit kernel boot option with Parallels but haven't tried it with Fusion yet. But I'm going to try it now to see if it resolves the problem where my clock sometimes runs fast. According to Timekeeping in VMware Virtual Machines, it's the recommended option for virtual machines because it doesn't do lost tick correction, which is what can make clocks run fast. I used the BootOptions instructions for Ubuntu to configure my kernel to boot with that option.