On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 3:28 PM, Aryanto Rachmad<[email protected]> wrote:

> I know that it is problematic to run ntpd on Xen domU, but could anybody
> give me some suggestion to have a stable system clock?

So, in virtual machines, "time" is variable. Your VM gets de-scheduled
frequently, for tenths of a second at a time. Which makes timekeeping
pretty tough. Even acurate CPU utlization is near-impossible to
measure from within a guest VM.

The usual "solution" is to have the hypervisor (dom0 in the Xen case)
run ntpd, and provide time to the guest VMs using a vendor-specific
driver. For VMware, this driver bundle is called "VMware Tools". For
the commercial Citrix XenServer, it's called "Xen Tools". For your
VPS, you should talk to your hosting provider I suppose.

In general though, virtualization is not very compatible with good
time keeping. But you should be able to do better than
three-second jumps.We generally see <100 ms offsets in guests on a
very busy VMware ESX 3.5u4 cluster.

See also:
http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Support/VMWareNTP

The VMware whitepaper listed there goes deep into the problem of
providing good time to guest operating systems.

-- 
RPM
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