A hopelessly inaccurate timeclock on my SLES host has been driving me nuts. I eventually found the relevant VMware white paper and used Virtual Center to set the ‘Advanced’ option to ‘Synchronize guest time with host’:
I also modified /boot/grub/menu.lst to add ‘clock=pit’ as an argument to the kernel invocation. Both changes required a reboot of the VM, but at least the issue is resolved now. Why on earth isn’t this option set by default?