Clock skew

kevriley

I'm getting a lot of 'clock skew' alerts, and within a few minutes of synchronizing the clocks on the base and a monitored server, it is out again by 20 secs or more. The monitored server is a VM - are there any known issues with VMs - not really a SQL Monitor problem I know......

Ben C

Hi Kevan

We haven't noticed particular issues with clock drift on VMs, but it seems that other people have. There is a question on Stack Overflow about it, and VMWare have a support document.

What VM host are you using? What guest OS? Are the guests in a domain?

Thanks
Ben

kevriley

VM Host : VMware Server 2.0.0 on Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2

Guest OS : Windows Server 2003 Ent x64 SP2

Yes all in domain


In the meantime I'll try and digest that support document.

Ben C

Do you have VMWare Tools installed on the guests? The support document indicates that it helps with time synchronization.

kevriley

Yes VMware tools are installed on the guest

Ben C

Hi Kevan

Did you get anywhere with the VMWare document?

Thanks
Ben

thejamie

We see it on VMWare 5 - most frequently on servers where the RAM exceeds its limit... example: limit is 6 Gig and RAM maxes to 8 GIG and runs an average of 6.7 GIG. (Not sure how it does this - it it only has 6 GIG to play with - anyway, that's what SQL Monitor shows).