When using Linux under VMware, a guest’s system time is affected when it is paused or suspended.  _place_holder;This is because the ntp daemon will give up when the time difference is too great.  _place_holder;I typically do not experience this problem because most of my guests are constantly running on an ESXi server.  _place_holder;My first exposure to this problem was when I started using VMware workstation on my laptop for development instead of the native OS.
To ensure that the ntp time daemon doesn give up during VM suspends, be sure to include the following line at the top of you /etc/ntp.conf file:
tinker panic 0
The VMware tools do not seem to be able to deal with suspends properly, either.  _place_holder;This has been the best solution to managing the time on my VMware workstation guests.