Agent unreliable within a VM?

[gena_hyperic]

I've a VMWare Server 1.0 running on a Windows 2000 (with SP4) host. A VMWare Guest is running Windows 2000 (with SP4). In this guest I have an HQ-Agent.

It finds the HQ-Server just fine, did auto-discovery just fine, etc. But it keeps losing the communications. It is extremely unreliable. The network connection is set to bridged (directly to the physical network).

I also have an HQ-Agent running on the VMWare host (the true Windows 2000 box) and that is very reliable and doesn't lose the communications.

I've tried this with 2.7.6 and have now even tried updating both the server and agent to 2.7.7 with same results.

Any ideas?

[cwitt_hyperic]

I am assuming the problem is isolated to just HQ communication (the machines can communicate with each other via ping, etc.). I've actually seen this type of HQ agent to server problem occur when a significant time skew exists between the Windows VM running an agent and the HQ Server. One of the metric indicators for the HQ Agent server type within HQ is the Server Offset. This tells you the time skew between this particular agent and the HQ Server.

You may want to check-out the VMware KB article on Time Synch and Windows Time Service (http://kb.vmware.com/vmtnkb/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1318&sliceId=SAL_Public) for a solution path to keep time synchronized.

[gena_hyperic]

Yes they can ping just fine.

I've looked at the time sync and it seems to be in sync. I am using VMTools there and have the guest sync'd to the host.