Time Clock Stops in FreeBSD 9.0 guest running under ESXi 5.0

[Adam Strohl]

On 3/10/2012 17:10, Bjoern A. Zeeb wrote:
> On 10. Mar 2012, at 08:07 , Adam Strohl wrote:
>
>> I've now seen this on two different VMs on two different ESXi servers (Xeon based hosts but different hardware otherwise and at different facilities):
>>
>> Everything runs fine for weeks then (seemingly) suddenly/randomly the clock STOPS.
>
> Apart from the ntp vs. openvm-tools thing, do you have an idea what "for weeks"  means in more detail?  Can you check based on last/daily mails/.. how many days it was since last reboot to a) see if it's close to a integer wrap-around or b) to give anyone who wants to reproduce this maybe a clue on how long they'll have to wait?  For that matter, is it a stock 9.0 or your own kernel?  What other modules are loaded?

Uptime was 31 days on the first incident / server (occurred 5 days ago)
Uptime was 4 days on the second incident / server (occurred last night)

One additional unique factor I just thought of: the two problem VMs have 
4 cores allocated to them inside ESXi, while the rest have 2 cores.

Kernel config is a copy of GENERIC (amd64) with the following lines 
added to the bottom.  All the VMs use this same kernel which I compiled 
once and then installed via NFS on the rest:

# -- Add Support for nicer console
#
options VESA
options SC_PIXEL_MODE

# -- IPFW support
#
options IPFIREWALL
options IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE
options IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE_LIMIT=10
options IPDIVERT
options IPFIREWALL_FORWARD