I created a CentOS 7.2 VM from the ISO using VMware Workstation 12 Player. Once the guest VM is running after installation, I can see that timestamps of some files are in future (ahead by couple of hours). I checked that the time of guest is synced with host.
Any idea?
I finally discovered the answer to this problem:
During post-installation tasks of guest VM installation, the guest VM uses the host time and assumes host timezone=UTC.
Imagine your host time is 12 Noon in IST (India), therefore during guest VM installation it will set guest VM time to 12 Noon UTC and all files those are updated during post-installation procedure will have timestamp 12 Noon UTC.
Assume that you selected timezone to America/New_York while installing the ISO. New York which is 5 hours behind UTC (4 Hours with DST on). So after restarting the VM, the system time will be around 2:30 AM EDT (since open-vm-tools is installed along with the ISO, the guest VM time is properly synced with host at restart) while the timestamps of files updated during post-installation will be around 8 AM EDT!