Wildly out of control clock under vmware
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Are you using the VMware appliance, or have the Open-VM-Tools package installed?
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Yes I am using the vmware tools version 102166_7_1. pfsense version 1.2.2
I just check my .vmx configuration it has
tools.syncTime = "FALSE"
should that be "TRUE"? I am running it in production so I don't want an unnecessary reboot.
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Chris -
yeah set that to true
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No joy. Setting that parameter to TRUE did not give an noticeable improvement in clock accuracy.
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Disable any CPU throttling on your underlying platform.
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How? Where?
Is this a config option of vmware? or am I nice-ing vmware with out knowing it?
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It's a setting either in the BIOS and/or in your operating system, I don't know if VMWare server can change this.
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I checked the proccess table I am running this is what I got:
command : ps -A -o pid,user,time,nice,args | grep vmware
3192 root 00:00:00 0 /usr/bin/vmnet-natd -d /var/run/vmnet-natd-4.pid -m /var/run/vmnet-natd-4.mac -c /etc/vmware/vmnet4/nat/nat.conf
3201 root 00:00:00 0 /usr/bin/vmnet-natd -d /var/run/vmnet-natd-8.pid -m /var/run/vmnet-natd-8.mac -c /etc/vmware/vmnet8/nat/nat.conf
3207 root 00:05:38 0 /usr/sbin/vmware-serverd -s -d
3245 root 00:00:02 0 /usr/lib/vmware-mui/apache/bin/httpd.vmware -DSSL -DSSL_ONLY -DGSX -d /usr/lib/vmware-mui/apache
3251 wwwrun 00:01:34 0 /usr/lib/vmware-mui/apache/bin/httpd.vmware -DSSL -DSSL_ONLY -DGSX -d /usr/lib/vmware-mui/apache
3256 wwwrun 00:00:00 0 /usr/lib/vmware-mui/apache/bin/httpd.vmware -DSSL -DSSL_ONLY -DGSX -d /usr/lib/vmware-mui/apache
3394 root 00:00:00 0 /usr/bin/vmnet-dhcpd -cf /etc/vmware/vmnet4/dhcpd/dhcpd.conf -lf /etc/vmware/vmnet4/dhcpd/dhcpd.leases -pf /var/run/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet4.pid vmnet4
10825 admin 01:14:55 -10 /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx -C /home/admin/vmware/pfSence/pfSence.vmx -@ ""
12725 admin 00:00:00 0 grep vmware-10 is the lowest (best) priority on the system at the moment. So I do not think I am starving the vmware proccess. Should I lower the nice-ness of vmware-serverd too?
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VMWare assumes (for the purposes of time keeping) that the processor runs at a fixed speed, that has nothing to do with nice or anything else. You need to ensure that the processor does run at that fixed speed - hence disabling processor performance management in hardware (or OS).
Intel call theirs SpeedStep, AMD call it Cool 'n' Quiet. It's also known as performance states (and a few other things).
Step one - look in your BIOS for anything called SpeedStep or Cool 'n' Quiet - disable it.
Step two - what version of Linux/BSD are you running?
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Ahh ok. So I will have to reboot to try this solution.
(to check the bios)I am running OpenSuse 11.0 on the box in question. 2.6.25 kernel. an intel x86_64 .
I just checked the "my computer" window in KDE, it said that the cpu speed was changing. So this could be the problem.
It will be a while for me to try this as the server is in production and I do not want to take it down for 20-30+ min with out
notice.
