Time synchronization in VMs

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This post is the wrong way to go about things, see this article for details, but basically what you want to do is make sure you have the following in the VM's .vmx file:

tools.syncTime = "TRUE"

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I'm noticed some serious time drift in my VMs (almost a day over a couple of weeks). Since I'm not running VMWare tools (I'm not running X), I needed a way to keep things in sync.

According to this page, time is synchronized at boot, which seems to be true, but isn't enough in my case.

So as suggested on the page, I installed ntp, but apparently the ntp-simple package no longer exists:

# apt-get install ntp-simple
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package ntp-simple is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
ntp
E: Package ntp-simple has no installation candidate

So I installed ntp instead:

# apt-get install ntp

Then I edit /etc/ntp.conf to use all the North American servers:

# vi /etc/ntp.conf
# grep ^server /etc/ntp.conf
server ntp.ubuntu.com
server 0.north-america.pool.ntp.org
server 1.north-america.pool.ntp.org
server 2.north-america.pool.ntp.org
server 3.north-america.pool.ntp.org