VMware – Enable Time Sync From Guest

February 10, 2009

I refuse to install X on servers.  Unless there is a very compelling reason (read: application dependent), I don’t include any of the X components on a Linux install.  After all, why would a headless server need a GUI?

So when I had to install the X server packages on my Virtual Machines just to turn on time sync, I was understandably put out.  I could log into the host and modify the .vmx file for my virtual machine, sure.  But if there is a method to do it from the guest, why not do it that way?  It turns out that vmware-guestd is the key on Linux Virtual Machines.
[root@tardis ~]# /usr/sbin/vmware-guestd –cmd “vmx.set_option synctime 0 1″
This will allow you to turn on the time sync between the guest and host from the command line when you don’t have the X server components installed and don’t want to/are unable to log into your host directly to modify the .vmx file.

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posted in VMware by Greg

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2 Comments to "VMware – Enable Time Sync From Guest"

  1. Nirav Shah wrote:

    When installing VMware Tools on a Windows Guest, “Time Synchronisation” is not enabled by default.
    However – “best practise” is to enable time synch on Windows Guests.

    There a several ways to do this from outside the VM, but I wanted to find a way to enable time sync from within the guest itself either on or after tools install.

    Surprisingly, this wasn’t quite as straightforward as I expected.
    (I assumed it would be posible to set this as a parameter / config option during tools install)

    After a bit of searching I found a way to do this in a VMware article called “Using the VMware Tools Command-Line Interface“.

    So, if time sync is disabled, you can enable it by running the following command line in the guest:

    VMwareService.exe –cmd “vmx.set_option synctime 0 1″

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