Hi all, got a problem.
I've had two different hosts in two different clusters apparently change their timezones without warning or apparent cause. One occurred on 12/23/2007 and the other was 1/6/2008. The first was Central time (CST) the other was Eastern (EST). Both are ESX 3.0.2, 62488 and managed by the same virtual center. The host apparently looses connection with virtual center and either reboots or HA moves the VM's off of it, and the VM's that were on the host now have their time set differently (the first case was 1 hour ahead, the second was three hours ahead). All hosts at time of build have been configured with their local geographical time zone and set to UTC. NTP is configured as per best practices for 0.vmware.pool.ntp.org, etc. The whole environment has been running this way for several months without issue.
I believe that the VM time difference is because they pick up the time after the timezone changes on the host and once they move to a different host they reflect the different offset. I believe the disconnection from virtual center may be because of the time difference, but that is only theory.
Has anyone else experienced something similar? Any ideas why the timezone could be changing (or how for that matter)? Ideas for prevention? I have 27 hosts and having this happen twice inside two weeks makes me nervous.
Assistance/ideas greatly appreciated.
