Virtual Servers

(imported topic written by Steve91)

Hi Chaps

We’re finding that a majority of our windows 2000 sp4 virtual servers are showing incorrect “Last Report Time”

They tend to be a day or two ahead, and in some instances 5 days ahead.

The clock on the virtual server and also the virtual host are set correctly, as are all the relays and the bes server.

The bes logs on the affected servers also have the correct time stamp in them.

I’ve removed and re-installed the client (we’re running both a mix of 6 and 7 client versions) but it has made no difference.

I’ve also run the “BES Incorrect Clock Time” fixlet but it always fails.

This is causing us some problems with our patching schedule as some of the servers are being patched and rebooted too early.

The 2003 virtual servers as a whole seem fine.

We’re running virtual server 2005 sp1

Any suggestions?

Cheers

Steve

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hi Steve,

The agents use the “apparent server time” as the time they report for “last report time”. The apparent server time is calculated by checking the local computer’s clock time and the server’s time and then comparing them using the system’s performance counter. So all times you see in the last report time in the console are supposed to be the server’s time.

On a real computer, if this time is off, it almost always indicates a motherboard defect. But I haven’t seen this for the virtual computers. You might try following the steps for this similar issue and see if it helps you isolate if the performance counter on the virtual computers are somehow malfunctioning:

http://support.bigfix.com/cgi-bin/kbdirect.pl?id=297

Ben

(imported comment written by Steve91)

Hi Ben

I followed the steps in the support article and it confirmed that the performance counter was incrementing much more than once per second, approximately 10 seconds for every one.

Interesting though was that we upgraded to 7.0.7.96 last night and I deployed the 7.0.7.96 client to the affected servers today and they are now fixed and reporting correctly.

Cheers

Steve