VMWare how to prevent a virtual machine from updating its date and time

You also need to tell the virtual machine to disable clock synchronization. Brian Keller has a blog post on how to do this with Microsoft Virtual PC. However, I needed to figure it out on VMWare Fusion. Luckily the following PDF from VMWare came to my rescue (http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf). The document is a little painful to read through, but basically all you need to do is open up the .vmx file in TextEdit and add the following entries:

tools.syncTime = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.continue = FALSE
time.synchronize.restore = FALSE
time.synchronize.resume.disk = FALSE
time.synchronize.shrink = FALSE
time.synchronize.tools.startup = FALSE

Two of these caused me problems, first tool.syncTime was already set to false (likely because the Virtual PC image I converted already had time sync disabled). Next was “time.synchronize.tools.startup = FALSE”. This stops the VMWare tools from setting the guest OS time on OS startup and was missing from all the other posts I saw online about dealing with this issue.

2019 update via a VMWare Knowledge Base article. There are now more events that trigger time syncs.

tools.syncTime = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.continue = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.restore = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.resume.disk = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.shrink = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.tools.startup = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.tools.enable = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.resume.host = "FALSE"