A hidden gem, the VMware descheduled time accounting tool can be found inside VMware tools on VI3. This little tool will solve your time woes with a couple of caveats. The first is that it is "experimental" but experimental that appears to work well and the second is that it only works on single processor vm's. In a windows VM it is installed as a service when you select the complete option of installing vmware tools or as a component under custom. Once installed you need to open the services panel, change the startup to automatic and start the service.

Leave the windows time service running and turn off the option in vmware tools to synch guest operating system with the host, This is done by right clicking on the vmware tools icon in the taskbar near the clock and bringing up the options. A little gotcha with the vmdesched tool is that if you migrate an esx 2.x vm, and upgrade a complete vm tools install then vmdeshed will not be installed. You will have to modify the installation and select it as a component.

 I won't rehash the whole thing as it is all explained in the vmdesched document, what I will say is it is a great way to make your time woes go away within your virtual infrastructure. The vmdesched documentation can be found here. Techrepublic also has a great whitepaper with the install steps for windows and linux here.

VMware has changed the way IT professional work today. The advantage is limitless for the creative IT professional who want to make their hands dirty at no cost, exploring all the possibilities they could ever think of. No more second thoughts and no more constraints – It’s all been made possible by VMware alone. Read more about this....

Recently I had this error on some virtual machines that I was trying to migrate from ESX 2.x to ESX 3.x via VirtualCenter. Read on for what the problem was and how it was fixed.