vmware player - run VM at specific date

Question

I have a centos7 VM running under VMWare Player. I have changed the vmx file so that

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"
rtc.startTime = "1463290457"

And it works. The VM date at startup is in May 2016.

Several months later, I have created another VM of centos 7 under VMPlayer 12.5.2. Again changed the above and this time it starts with date set to now.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to debug this? There is nothing in the VMware.log that I can see that is useful. The values in the vmx file are loaded.

Regards,

Answer 1

forgot to set "Automatic date and time" to off in Settings in Centos. Also giving the VM a static IP address in DHCP seemed to be necessary.