Jeff Beard

I have a Dell 2950 on which I installed Ubuntu Gutsy and VMware Server to host some applications for testing. The guest OS was CentOS 5 in an appliance put together by the folks running the Thoughtpolice web site. I found that the CentOS guest time was off and didn’t synchronize itself automagically as I expected. I didn’t notice the issue on my workstation which has a host OS of Windows XP with the same appliance but the VMware server on the Ubuntu host was eating up CPU time.

Using top I saw that the vmware-vmx process was pegged at the top of the list using between 7-10% of the CPU time. Unless a system is under heavy load or running bad code, I do not expect to see something like this. I used the strace utility to look at what the process was doing and found that it was making thousands of calls to system function gettimeofday(). Since I have been having trouble with time synchronization even on my workstation instance of this appliance, I found this interesting. In searching the VMware knowledge base for the gettimeofday() I found the document entitled vmware_timekeeping.pdf which instructed me to install VMware Tools with the time synchronization feature enable.

This, however, did not work. What did work was creating my own appliance from scratch and installing VMware Tools on that. I did not have to apply any settings regarding time synchronization either; it worked “out of the box” as you would expect.

Anyway, I take this to mean that appliances are not as portable as you might think. The version of the VMware product used to create the appliance has an effect during runtime and if there is a difference that can be problems.