VMware Workstation - Times are a-changing

Following on from an LTPA-related issue that I saw yesterday, I realised why I might be having problems with the clocks in my VMs getting out of sync.

I regularly suspend my laptop with the VMs still running - the combination of VMware Workstation 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 (host) makes this very workable, and suspend/resume is a very very quick process. In fact, this combination is as efficient as running VMware Fusion on the Mac, which also handles suspend/resume of host and guest seamlessly.

Having checked this morning, and seen that the timestamps on log files in one of my VMs was 21:20 even though it's 06:39, I realised that the guest OS still thought it was yesterday :-)

Thanks to yesterday's efforts, I know that VMware Tools is up-to-date, so I thought I'd explore further.

Digging in a bit, I found this command: -

vmware-toolbox-cmd timesync enable

which, according the VMware Tools Configuration Utility User's Guide ( VMware Fusion 3.0, VMware ACE 2.6, VMware Workstation 7.0, VMware Player 3.0) [PDF]: -

After you complete this procedure, the VMware Tools service enables or disables periodic time synchronization, as you specified.

Good enough for me. My clocks are now in sync - will see how this works after my next suspend/resume e.g. what the interval is.