Comment 16 for bug 2039206

The reason hwclock isn't shipped any more is that Ubuntu now uses systemd's functionality to perform the same task instead. To configure RTC translation between UTC and local time, the primary supported method is now "sudo timedatectl set-local-rtc 0" or "sudo timedatectl set-local-rtc 1". See timedatectl(1) for details (including why '1' is unreliable). Use of hwclock should be considered a deprecated method on newer releases of Ubuntu, although I'm not aware of any plans to remove it completely and it looks like the new method is currently entirely compatible with the old one.

This isn't Ubuntu-specific - I imagine that this is the case for all platforms that are exclusively based on systemd.

Given that open-vm-tools itself does not contain the call to hwclock either, I'm not sure that we can consider this to be an actionable bug against Ubuntu itself.

Is it possible for VMware guest customization to use the new recommended method on newer Ubuntu releases instead? Alternatively, I suggest that if you're sending commands to run via open-vm-tools, that you precede that with commands to ensure that the packages those commands depend on are installed first.