Type the following hwclock command to read the Hardware Clock and display the time on screen: I added the -utc option to the kickstart timezone option and it solved this issue.Sample outputs: Mon Jan 21 01:31: Linux Display The Hardware Clock (RTC) The guest was created using a kickstart file which by default doesn't set the hardware clock on UTC time. The answer by Michael Hampton below solved the problem. The output is a little clearer though because the software and hardware clocks are set with the same time. I set the hardware clock to use local time using the -localtime option on the hwclock command. I've run dmesg | grep kvm-clock on the guest and it confirmed kvm clock is in use.There is a good discussion of this in KVM guests clock synchronisation, which suggests that kvm-clock running in the guest should take care of this. I've considered using a time server to resolve the issue, but Ubuntu recommends not using NTP on the KVM guests.One of the kvm hosts is running Ubuntu 11.04 and the same behaviour happened.I tried this on three separate physical servers all exhibit the same exact behaviour.Once the time is corrected on the guests then they can be rebooted without the time shifting incorrectly. The output below shows the system time and hardware clock time on the host and guest. If however the KVM host is rebooted (the host has no time issues between reboots), then once I start my KVM guests all of them are exactly 3 hours behind the correct time. After setting the time correctly in the guests using date -s I am able to reboot the guests as much as I like with the correct time being retained between reboots. The servers are in the AST time zone which is UTC + 3 hours. I have installed Ubuntu server 12.04 as a KVM host, and created an Ubuntu guest that is also running Ubuntu server 12.04.

Change timezone linux without reboot