I would assume that introducing a VM that has &quot;time-travelled&quot; (especially the restore-from-previous-state case someone mentioned above) into a distributed system would inherently break that distributed system, no matter what it&#x27;s doing. It&#x27;s a really crazy thing to do, much crazier than a regular network partition.<p>Personally, though, I don&#x27;t see why it&#x27;s so hard to just say &quot;this distributed lock system requires that soft real-time guarantees can be made of the host platform. If the platform misses the algorithm&#x27;s scheduling deadline, the system breaks. If the platform has no way of providing for a soft real-time deadline (because e.g. it&#x27;s running in a VM that can be paused), the software will detect this and fail to start.&quot;