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″