I have setup VirtualBox-OSE 3.2.4 on a 64-bit Debian Host with kernel 2.6.26
with an Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5504 @ 2.00GHz
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# uname -a
Linux machVM1 2.6.26-2-amd64 #1 SMP Tue Jan 12 22:12:20 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux
The host server is also a SAMBA server connected as a member server of the formed windows AD domain.
vmstat on the host gives me the following:
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# vmstat
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
1 0 6408 49976 294484 3124472 0 0 149 56 21 9 1 12 80 7
while Guest machine (B) is running AD services, DHCP, DNS and Print Services.
On both machines I have Guest Additions v3.2.4 installed and on both machines the windows time service (w32time) runs.
On both machines the ntp service runs as NT5DS. This sets machine (A) to try to synchronize with the domain controller which is machine (B).
On machine (B) time is always in sync with the host. It happens that both are from time to time out of sync then after a while - less that 5 minutes - the clocks are in sync again. I think that this is due to VB Guest Additions.
The problem is that (A) starts to loose time after 12 hours when the machine is first powered on. Then, even if I restart the machine (A) OS the clock always looses time immediately. If I poweroff machine (A) and power it on again then I get the 12 hour grace time of synced clocks.
I have setup a notification service which reads the time from the 3 machines (A,B and host) via the "net time" linux command and compares it to the host time. After 12 hours have passed the clock starts to drift, until the difference is about 1200 seconds (20 minutes) and then it is automatically corrected.
Since restart of the guest OS does not fix the problem, while poweroff fixes it, I believe it is a VirtualBox problem.
I have compared the machine .xml files and could not find any difference that could be the cause of such problematic time behaviour. In fact I have applied all the differences of the .xml files from machine (B) to machine (A) I could think that should be responsible for such a behaviour but the issue has not been fixed.
Does anybody know how I can fix this issue?
Kind regards to all,
Panos.
