Improvement Suggestion: Workstation Should Deal With Power Saving CPUs Automatically

[WhiteKnight]

Currently, after installing VMware Workstation, when Workstation recognizes a host that throttles a CPUs speed to save power, a message box pops up informing the user to add a couple of entries to the config.ini file to solve the problem for keeping a guest's realtime clock providing a correct time of day.

This is quite an intrinsic VMware problem that a user shouldn't be bothered to deal with.

I'd like to suggest to have VMware deal with this issue automatically without the need to have the user fiddle around in config files.

[RDPetruska]

Refer to the whitepaper on Timekeeping in a Virtual Machine for all sorts of technical discussions on this topic.

It is nearly impossible for virtualization software to work well on a CPU which does not have a consistent clock.

Robert

[WhiteKnight]

I see your point.

But that's not particularly what I'm up to with my suggestion...

Workstation displayed a message box to me telling me that due to my power saving CPU it would be best to update the config.ini with a couple of settings to accommodate for the time issues. A knowledgebase article contained details about this issue.

Instead of putting effort in the message box and the knowledgebase article text it would have been better if VMware would just have implemented to update the config.ini file automatically and silently. Then the user wouldn't need to deal with issues he/she doesn't care about. For why should he/she bother with this issue? If Workstation believes these steps are necessary to make things work properly, then I'd suggest to just make it work.

See my intention?

[RDPetruska]

>Instead of putting effort in the message box and the knowledgebase article text it would have been better if VMware would just have implemented to update the config.ini file automatically and silently. Then the user wouldn't need to deal with issues he/she doesn't care about. For why should he/she bother with this issue? If Workstation believes these steps are necessary to make things work properly, then I'd suggest to just make it work.

I see your point. However, I believe that VMware is providing the user with information. It is up to the user to decide whether or not it is important enough to them to make those suggested changes. For some users, or some virtual machines, timekeeping is not as important, and therefore they would decide NOT to make the changes.

[WhiteKnight]

Sorry for me replying that late. I didn't notice you had already replied...

Well, still, if the issue would be dealt with automatically, importance wouldn't matter. For those who believe time keeping is unimportant, they wouldn't mind if Workstation automatically added these values silently. And for the others, they wouldn't even notice there was an issue at all.

You know, the point is: There is no valid situation where these corrections arbitrarily should not be made.