I have a very odd problem that's causing me major grief. I have a ESXI 4.1 U1 host, which has been happily running with various builds of 4.1 for 8 months with no time problems. A few weeks ago I upgraded the host to ESXi 4.1 U1, but hadn't used the server much since it's a test/lab box. Today when trying to get some work done, I noticed that the VM time was WAY off (by several days). So I go into vCenter and look at the ESXi host date/time. It's also way off (same as the VM time). I have NTP setup, but clearly something was amiss. I manually reset the time to the correct date/time. I then went into each VM and also reset the time as well, so everything was in sync.
A few minutes later I noticed in vCenter the ESXi host time/date jumped wildly ...either 3/24/11 or 3/10/11. So I reboot the ESXi host and check the physical BIOS time. It's spot on for GMT, as I expected. So I boot back into ESXi and all seems to be well. Then within the hour, the ESXi time as reported in vCenter widly jumps back to either 3/10/11 or 3/24/11. I then removed the NTP client IP address and stopped the NTP client, thinking it was all confused. Once again, I reset the time back in vCenter on the ESXi host to the proper time. Within a couple of minutes it jumps again, now usually to 3/24/11. After beating it with a stick and manually changing it, it seems to say for an hour or so, then flips to either 3/10/11 or 3/24/11.
I've never had a SINGLE time related problem since this machine was loaded with ESXi 4.1. I don't know if the issue is with 4.1 U1, maybe something due to the time change last weekend, or what. I've literally manually set the ESXi host time in vCenter 10-20 times today and it refuses to stick for more than an hour or two. Just to make sure I'm not crazy I rebooted the server a couple of times to double check the physical BIOS time and every time it's perfectly set to GMT time.
To be clear, the time first jumps in vCenter when I'm looking at the configuration tab of the ESXi host. After that it jumps to either 3/10 or 3/24, a while later the Windows VMs follow to the same time/date. If I go into the VM's BIOS, more often than not the BIOS date/time is correct, but sometimes it's also wacked out to the same two dates.
Ideas?
Update: Now it just jumped to 3/29/11, which is 10 days ahead of reality. A few minutes ago it was only jumping to 3/24/11.
Update 2: I reconfigured the NTP client to point to a public NTP pool (1.pool.ntp.org), but after ~45 minutes the date jumped back to 3/10/11. Less than a minute after a manual reset back to today's date/time, it jumped back to 3/10/11. Rinse and repeat 3 more times....
Derek Seaman
