I have been scraching my head over a prolonged problem with VMWare’s free VMServer, where I have been using VMServer (version 1.4). I have guest OSes (Win2K3 and Linux) running and these guest OSes have been experiencing a drift in their system clocks.

The symptom is that:  when the host and guest OSes are booted and started, everything is running fine. After a few days or weeks, the clocks in the guest OSes are drifting  and becoming faster, so much faster that literally, every second in real life is about 3-4 seconds in the virtual machines!

This causes a problem because one of my guest OSes is running an email server, and hence the timestamp on the emails were becoming skewed.

Initially I thought the problem had to do with the dual core processing of AMD cpu and the outdated VM Server version, I have made some tweaks and the clock skew improved only but a little.

Finally I think I’ve found the answer – it is to do with the power saving feature (which changes the speed of the processor) on a motherboard.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1227

Hope this will solve your problem as much as mine!