Thanks for the responses on this gang, a couple of further notes. - We do have all of our ESX host systems syncing via NTP. As mentioned previously I've set the flag to sync off the ESX host within VMtools which didn't change the behavior we're seeing. - we've moved this virtual system between multiple ESX host systems. Only this single VM appears affected. This issue appears to occur regardless of either ESX, or virtual host load. I've dug through the VMware forums as well on this, but I haven't posted about this there yet, but I'll give it a go in a few here. As an interim workaround we have an update script running as a task from another server, forcing our errant server to sync it's time each minute. It's duct tape over the wound really . .but that's working with windows sometimes. I think Bob's comment on "something may be polling the clock" has some merit, as we have PGP process tied to the webservices on this system which are very time dependant. This might be a good lead to send our webdevs chasing after as I look to open up a case with vmware. thanks for the insights Thinners :) Cheers, Lan On 1/9/07, TSguy92 Lan <tsguy92@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This is just so odd and I haven't come across anything useful in websearches so I thought I'd bounce it off the mighty brains of this list :) We have a windows 2000 sp4 server (currently running as a virtual machine on ESX 3.01), that has started mis-counting the time alloted for Seconds. I'm really not sure how else to phrase this, we can pull up the clock on the server from the systray, and can visually watch the seconds tick away at extended intervals. (IE - instead of 1 second every second, we'll see 1 second tick, then can have a pause of up to 3-5 seconds before the next second ticks by.) This delay gradually builds up until the server is off from the domain time by several minutes . . obviously this is an issue. On a reboot of this machine, the problem is no longer evident, in fact we rebooted it in the evening to avoid production down time, all was good when it came back up, but this morning (shortly after start of business) our time issues showed up again. As a work around we created a script to sync the server every minute and set it to run as a local system task. But of course since the system counts it's minutes rather slowly, the script doesn't run as often as it should, so I'll be re-keying this to run from a remote system. The setting within Vmware tools to "sync time between the virtual machine and the console operating system" is disabled, however enabling it has not made any notable changes. We've gone ahead and migrated this VM to a couple different physical ESX hosts as well without any apparent differences either. My web-devs really want to point the finger at VMware, I'm inclined so far to believe this is more of a windows issue, but I can't think of what it could be. Any MS KB's that I've found related to system time have been unhelpful so far. Only the fact that this issue appears to re-occur once our business day starts up leans me twoards suspecting the underlying coding for the webservices hosted on this system...we're working on getting time allocated to disable webrelated services on this box to see if we can isolate this issue to them. If anyone has any thoughts for tracking this one down, I'd greatly appreciate it. As is I'm loosing too much hair on this one ;) TIA Lan