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mwheeler1982
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Enthusiast

ESX 3.5 Build 123630 - Guest sync time with host after VMotion?

I'm seeing a bit of an odd occurance and I'm wondering if anyone else can confirm that this is either a bug or a feature, and if it can be disabled.

We 4 hosts in our cluster. One of them had its time off (not sure how that happened since nptd was running, but that's another issue I'll figure out later). After the infamous "time bomb" bug, we have set all our VMware tools to NOT sync with the host. But, it seems that after a VMotion event, the guest does sync its time with the target host even if VMware tools is configured not to.

This has been causing on-and off problems with our applications. The guest is Vmotioned to ESX #4, its time changes to that of the host, then win32 time syncs every so often and it gets put back. But reports, random application crashes, and time being off all occur around the same time as the vmotion events to the server with its time off.

I've sync'd ntpd again on host #4, and just for the sake of doing it, put something in cron.hourly to run a 'ntpdate -u 2>&1 > /dev/null' to sync the host time hourly. Hopefully that will keep everything in check for the time being.

Can anyone confirm that this is a "feature"? Can it be turned off?

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marcelo_soares
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This shows you how to completely disable time sync:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1189

As vmotion "turns on" the VM on the target host, this will always happen. Disabling like the KB says resolves the issue.

Marcelo Soares

VMWare Certified Professional 310

Technical Support Engineer

Linux Server Senior Administrator

Marcelo Soares
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