With the increasing size of ship, the damage of the longitudinal vibration of shaft is increasingly exposed. This paper adopted a damping vibration absorber to attenuate longitudinal vibration of the hollow shaft system, established the dynamic model of shaft with dynamic vibration absorber combining with the substructure synthetic method and transfer matrix method, and analyzed the frequency response function of shaft under harmonic excitation, which is verified by the traditional finite element method using ANSYS software. The theoretical calculation and simulation results showed that the frequency response function curve near the resonance frequency turned to smooth by adding dynamic vibration absorber. A dynamic vibration absorber is designed and then an experimental verification is conducted. The testing results show that the resonance peak is strongly attenuated when dynamic vibration absorber attached to the shaft, which indicates the attenuation effect of dynamic vibration absorber is obvious. Based on hollow characteristics of a large marine propulsion shafting system, a DVA can be installed into the void location of the hollow shafting, which saves space and has a good absorption performance, can be a new choice in the control of longitudinal vibration of marine propulsion shafting system in future.