VMware has decided to retire VMI support:
http://blogs.vmware.com/guestosguide/2009/09/vmi-retirement.html
Their thinking behind this is that CPU virtualization technologies are overtaking any potential performance benefits from paravirtualised guests. (This announcement doesn’t refer to the paravirtualised drivers they have been introducing.)
VMI will be phased out of Workstation first; beginning in 2010; followed by vSphere in 2011.
Obviously they feel the effort in maintaining this capability isn’t worth it. I get the impression that VMware introduced VMI primarily to compete with Xen. I don’t think that VMware was ever that convinced that it was a good way to virtualize VMs.
I use VMI guests only for NTP servers, no matter what I cannot get NTP to sync up in a fully virtualized guest. Though in a VMI guest it works fine. Wonder what the solution to running an NTP server will be if VMI goes away. Not interested in running a physical box to sync my VM hosts to that just has NTP, and not interested in having them sync directly to the internet(in many cases the hosts don’t have internet access).
Hi Nate,
What is the guest OS you are using for your NTP servers? Do you have VMware tools installed in the guest?
I just wonder what sort of problems you are experiencing, just that they lose a little bit of time or does it vary wildly? Does the ESX host keep its time properly? Is the host synced to another NTP source?
Anyway, if you want an internal based NTP source, but don’t want to use a physical server, why not use one of your core switches or something like your firewall. That’s a pretty common way to have a centralized time source for all your servers.