Xen HVM domU doesn’t synchronize with dom0 clock

After much research I’ve discovered that Xen does not synchronize the clock between dom0 and its HVM domUs. This poses a problem when you implement S3 sleep. Upon resume,  dom0 realizes how much time has passed but none of the domUs do. I realized this after a few days of successfully putting my Xen machine to sleep with running DomU virtual machines

The DomU in my case is a Windows 8.1 virtual machine. At first I thought that the standard Windows time service would take care of any clock discrepancies – it doesn’t. If your clock gets too far behind it simply refuses to update. My solution to this problem is two fold:

  1. Configure Windows to use my NTP server for clock updates
  2. Force Windows to check with the NTP server every minute and update its clock accordingly.

Fortunately the later Windows versions have an NTP client built in. Simply open an administrator command prompt and issue two commands:

w32tm /config /syncfromflags:manual /manualpeerlist:<hostname>

schtasks /create /sc minute /mo 1 /tn "NTP clock update" /tr "%WINDIR%\system32\w32tm.exe /resync /force" /RU SYSTEM

The first command configures your system with your NTP server of choice. Replace <hostname> with your desired hostname or IP address, minus the brackets. The second command creates a task which executes a command to force an NTP check every minute as the SYSTEM user (non-privileged users get an access denied message.) You can do it all with a GUI but the command line is so much more efficient 🙂

It works perfectly. My DomU now automatically checks if it has the correct time – very important if you ever put your dom0 to sleep while DomUs are running.

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