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madman999
Contributor
Contributor

NTP issues on 5.5

I have setup NTP on my hosts to timesync to another server.  It seems to work correctly except the time seems to be off by 1 minute or less.  Since i am working in a financial company, an error of seconds could be troublesome.

this only affects my virtual machines at bootup so I have them timesync afterwards.  however if the timesync doesn;t occur the virtual machine's time could grow in time to be off by a large amount.

Has anyone else experienced issues like this?

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

Can you confirm that the ESXi hosts are not syncing the time from a VM which is running on these hosts, and that the NTP server (and port) is reachable from the hosts?

Maybe Troubleshooting NTP on ESX and ESXi 4.x / 5.x / 6.x (1005092) | VMware KB can help.

André

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madman999
Contributor
Contributor

the esxi hosts ARE syncing to a time server located on an ESXI host. 

The NTP server is reachable and all ports open.

the time sync does work but it seems like the time falls behind by a minute or 2.

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vcallaway
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Why not point your ESXi hosts to an external time source or something external to the ESXi host at least? You're syncing your host to a guest located on the host. I could see a loop of time skew here.

I sync my hosts with a Cisco router that sync's with an external time source (ntp pool etc..). My VM's sync to AD and/or through VMtools down to the ESXi host. I hope this helps.

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Miquel_A
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

I would recommend you to review the ntp logs located in /var/log and see if you see any strange event that can help you where to start looking, and maybe it could help you to see the hostd.log file in /var/log , sometimes it has useful information for troubleshooting purposes.

Let us know how it goes and good luck!

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