How to stop a nested ESXi host syncing time with it's physical ESXi host.

[MC1903]

I am trying to stand up a nested ESXi 6.x host with the date purposely about 2 years earlier than today.

I have disabled/unchecked the VM options "sync time periodically" and the 4 "run VMware Tools scripts" options.

I booted the VM to BIOS and reset the date back to where I wanted.

Booting the ESXi installer initially shows the 'wrong' date, until just at the end, when 'Jumpstart plugin vmtoolsd activated" is executed and it syncs the current time/date with my physical host.

• Is there a simple way of stopping this happening?
• Is there an ESXi 6.x installer without the VMtools packages pre-installed - I can't see one to download?
• Is there any way to remove the VMtools packages from the ISO and re-package it?

Any thoughts/pointers will be appreciated.

Cheers,

M

[MC1903]

So I used image builder to export a ESXi-6.7.0-20191204001-no-tools image profile as a bootable ISO. Reset the VM date, booted from said ISO and I get the same date change as 'Jumpstart plugin vmtoolsd activated" is executed.

So I am now thinking I just need to remove/uninstall the actual VMtools daemon vmtoolsd from the ESXi installation or stop it executing.

[StephenMoll]

I don't think you can disable the one-time time-sync easily in the GUI in ESXi 6.x.

A VM as a representation of a physical machine does not have a real-time clock that runs when the machine is powered down, like a real PC does. ESXi gets around this by updating the BIOS time from host time during the power on sequence, and this is enabled by default.

To stop this one time sync, you need to follow the instructions in this KB : https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1189

[MC1903]

Thanks Stephen,

I got it working by nesting the ESXi host I want to keep the 'wrong' date/time, inside another nested host; where I have manually changed it's date/time back 2 years.

The extra later of nesting made things a little slower, but I was able to test what I need to.

Cheers,

M