I just came across a new, at least for me, well quirk? A VMware Player VM where the VM RTC is or appears to run accelerated, the question is why? The actual tick duration appears to be incorrect. I have never seen this behavior before. This is not the usual time synchronization or time drift scenario most if not all of us familiar with virtualization have seen or resolved.
Background, established a typical desktop system, Windows 7 SP1 all patches, based on ASUS Sabertooth 990fx r2.0 board, AMD FX-8350, 32 GB RAM, SSD disk for Windows 7, mechanical disks for other uses. The hardware is referenced only to provide context, not fuel debate about what hardware is used and why. The system is configured with all defaults in BIOS, latest BIOS firmware 2501. System is stable, consistent, etc. Establish a number of VMs, one running Windows 7 SP1, full patched, 2 vCPUs 2 GB RAM, a few others of similar size, running Ubuntu, CentOS, etc. All VMs work as expected.
I overclocked the system, slightly, and here is where things get interesting, the VMs, are accelerated! Now I recall that Linux VMs sometime ago have had a VM RTC quirk or too, but I don't recall Windows based VMs have similar issues to the same extent. I even tried the work-around in the following... http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1227
I have worked with ESX (classic) since 2002 when it was raw, ESXi since about 2008, VMware Workstation, VMware Player, etc., KVM, Xen, even Hyper-V. So I know my way around virtualization. I don't overclock hardware as rule, and 90% of my experience is with server class hardware, large servers, 16 and 32 logical processors at times, but with this specific desktop, my curious nature, and the ease of overclocking on ASUS mainboards, I wondered what the impact would be. So I overclocked the system above, as I previously noted, by about 10% so the FX-8350 at 4Ghz is running about 4.4Ghz, the RAM is rated at 1866, but set to 1333 initially per the requirements of the mainboard recommended default, before OC, so I am really pushing for the most part only the FX-8350. The system is very stable, having good consistent power source, and validated via MemTest, Prime95, etc. before and after any overclocking experimentation..
The behavior is rather interesting, watching a VM where the seconds in BIOS boot delay tick off as fractions of a second. Windows 7 boots, but login is impossible, because keystrokes are handled in an inconsistent manner.
I have tried uninstall of VMware Player and reinstall knowing any number of default settings in VMware Player rely or assume hardware consistency, which I have of course changed without remorse under VMware Player. I have tried establishing new VMs from scratch, and other ideas, but nothing seems to change the situation. If I un-overclock the system, leaving VMware Player installed as is, then run the same VMs exhibiting the quirk behavior the issue disappears, apparently completely.
I figure someone has seen this before? But after reasonable time with Google I did not seem to find similar scenario, or my Google search query skills failed to locate comparable references. Have I discovered the only real variant of (virtual) time travel, traveling into the future only from the VM perspective? Wonder what Einstein would have said about this? Or virtualization in general?