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synchronization with an external time server. Another approach involves disabling the native
time synchronization across the Windows domain and then relying on the VMware Tools fea-
ture. A third approach might be to synchronize the VMware ESXi hosts and the PDC Emulator
operations master with the same external time server and then to enable the VMware Tools
option for synchronization. In this case, both the native W32Time service and VMware Tools
should be adjusting the time to the same value.
VMware has a couple of Knowledge Base articles that contain the latest recommendations
for timekeeping. For Windows-based guest OS installations, refer to http://kb.vmware.com/
kb/1318 or refer to the document “Timekeeping in Virtual Machines” at the following location:
www.vmware.com/files/pdf/Timekeeping-In-VirtualMachines.pdf
Configuring NTP on ESXi
If you do choose to synchronize the guest OS to the ESX i host using VMware Tools, be sure to syn-
chronize the ESXi host to an authoritative time source using NTP. Refer to Chapter 2, “Planning
and Installing VMware ESXi” for more information on how to confi gure ESXi to synchronize with
an NTP-based time server.
We've shown you how to install VMware Tools into a Windows-based guest operation sys-
tem, so now we'd like to walk through the process for a Linux-based guest OS.
Installing VMware Tools in Linux
There are a number of different versions (or distributions) of Linux available and supported by
VMware vSphere, and while they are all called “Linux,” they do have subtle differences from
one distribution to another that make it difi cult to provide a single set of steps that would apply
to all Linux distributions. In this section, we'll use Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)
version 11, a popular enterprise-focused distribution of Linux, as the basis for describing how to
install VMware Tools in Linux.
Perform the following steps to install VMware Tools into a VM running the 64-bit version of
SLES 11 as the guest OS:
1. Use the vSphere Web Client to connect to a vCenter Server instance or use the vSphere
Client to connect to an individual ESXi host.
2. You will need access to the console of the VM onto which you're installing VMware Tools.
Right-click the VM and select Open Console.
3. Log into the Linux guest OS using an account with appropriate permissions. This will
typically be the root account or an equivalent (some Linux distributions, including
Ubuntu, disable the root account but provide an administrative account you can use).
4. Right-click the virtual machine and choose All vCenter Actions
Guest OS
Install
VMware Tools. Click Mount on the dialog box that pops up.
5. Assuming that you have a graphical user environment running in the Linux VM, a i le
system browser window will open to display the contents of the VMware Tools ISO that
was automatically mounted behind the scenes.
 
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