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Saturday, March 22, 2008

vmware Workstation : Your host does not have synchronized TSCs. Please read VMware Knowledge Base article 2041

VMWare Workstation evaluation

While trying out vmware workstation trial/evaluation copy, come across warning messages. Here is what happened. Downloaded VMWare workstation from VMWare downloads section.

  • Hardware
The home PC has amd athlon X2 64 and Windows xp sp 3 with 250 gb hdd and 3 gb ram.

  • Installation
Installation of VMWare workstation is easy breezy .

  • Fedora core 8 for guest OS
Downloaded Fedora Core 8 to play with VMWare workstation.

  • Creation of virtual machine
On completion of successful download of Fedora Core 8 at c:\temp, started VMWare workstation.Using new => virtual machine have invoked virtual machine wizard selected custom option to choose other linux 2.6.x kernel. And allocated resources like virtual hard drive, RAM, etc.

  • Warning Message
When powered on fedora core 8, it give warning message



"Your host does not have synchronized TSCs. Please read VMware Knowledge Base article 2041".

Clicked on ok and let Fedora Core 8 power on.

  • Issue Resolution
To resolve the issue I have added following lines to config.ini which is existing in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware workstation

processor0.use = TRUE
processor1.use = FALSE
host.noTSC = "TRUE"
ptsc.noTSC = "TRUE"
host.TSC.noForceSync = "TRUE"

  • Interesting findings:

While digging into the issue, I have come across some interesting resources. These resources are related to .VMX file which is generated by VMWare workstation and performance degradation issue for computers running windows xp sp2 on multiple processors with resolution fix pack from Microsoft.

Here are those resources for further reference on virtual machine file:

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks!

This tip seems to have worked for me. I'm using VMware Workstation 6.02 to test a couple of Windows Server 2003 VM's.

AMD Athlon 64X2 4400+

One thing though: For me, there was not a "config.ini" file in the above mentioned folder. ...So, I used Notepad to create one and just pasted in the few suggested lines of code.

TSC error message is no more. Will be interesting to see if performance improves...