VMWare clockspeed/timekeeping

oceaness · 6 Dec 2008 at 14:28

Has anyone else experienced problems with timekeeping in VMWare?

VMWare gave me this message.

VMware Workstation has measured your CPU speed to be 2666 MHz, but Windows reports that it is 2670 MHz. This may mean that your computer has a power-saving feature that varies the processor speed. As a result, the clock in your virtual machine may run too fast or too slow.

For a workaround, please refer to the VMware knowledge base article at:
http://vmware.com/info?id=97.

One of biggest problems I found when I was running it was how the clock always went massively out so I dont know if anyone might find the article linked to useful

Of course anyone with an overclock should have things like Speedstep and CoolnQuiet disabled anyway so for the large majority this probably shouldn't be an issue.

Though FAH would strss the CPU for the duration of a unit, inbetween WU's it's possible that the CPU speed could relax if CPU powersaving features are enabled.

oceaness · 7 Dec 2008 at 13:38

VMWare tools can only make the guest clock catch up to the host clock if its lagging, if it's runnning fast there's very little you can do about it.

So far so good got two VM's running and they've been completely stable

oceaness · 7 Dec 2008 at 16:32

The VMWare Timekeeping PDA file, linked to at the bottom of the linked article in my original post has some very in depth information if you can understand it.

So far my VM's appear to be working ok, but it will be interesting to see how it goes over the course of a couple of weeks or more.

oceaness · 7 Dec 2008 at 23:21

Biffa said:
NTP is your friend, just set it to update from a machine on the network every minute

Yup I did that before, but for NTP to work it has to be within a certain amount either way of the current time.

My VM's sometimes went years out.

This newer version does seem to be an awful lot better, the clocks appear to be ever so slightly faster than the host, but NTP will be able to cope with that