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. In the first case I saw a jump backwards of about 15
minutes (and then a 'freeze' of the clock). The second time just 'time
standing still' with no backwards jump. Logging accuracy is of course
questionable given the nature of the issue, but nothing really jumps out
(ie; I don't see NTPd adjusting the time just before this happens or
anything like that).
Naturally the clock stopping causes major issues, but the machine does
technically stay running. My open sessions respond, but anything that
relies on time moving forward hangs. I can't even gracefully reboot it
because shutdown/etc all rely on time moving forward (heh).
So I'm not sure if this is a VMWare/ESXi issue or a FreeBSD issue, or
some kind of interaction between the two. I manage lots of VMWare
based FreeBSD VMs, but these are the only ESXi 5.0 servers and the only
FreeBSD 9.0 VMs. I have never seen anything quite like this before, and
last night as I mentioned above I had it happen for the second time on a
different VM + ESXi server combo so I'm not thinking its a fluke
anymore. I've looked for other reports of this both in VMWare and
FreeBSD contexts and not seeing anything.
What is interesting is that the 2 servers that have shown this issue
perform similar tasks, which are different from the other VMs which have
not shown this issue (yet). This is 2 VMs out of a dozen VMs spread
over two ESXi servers on different coasts. This might be a coincidence
but seems suspicious. These two VMs run these services (where as the
other VMs don't):
- BIND
- CouchDB
- MySQL
- NFS server
- Dovecot 2.x
I would also say that these two VMs probably are the most active, have
the most RAM and consume the most CPU because of what they do (vs. the
others).
I have disabled NTPd since I am running the OpenVM Tools (which I
believe should be keeping the time in sync with the ESXi host, which
itself uses NTP), my only guess is maybe there is some kind of collision
where NTPd and OpenVMTools were adjusting the time at the same time.
I'm playing the waiting game now to see what this brings (again though I
am running NTPd and OpenVMTools on all the other VMs which have yet to
show this issue).
Anyone seen anything like this? Ring any bells?
--
Adam Strohl
A-Team Systems
http://ateamsystems.com/
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