Can Hosts sync Date and Time from VCSA?

[HFMudd]

I am struggling to find a direct answer. I have a secure isolated environment with no external access and several hosts. I want to get the date and time sync'd across the vsphere landscape. NTP is out, but it seems to me that it would be logical that all hosts registered to vCenter should be able to sync date and time. Is that not how it works?

[daphnissov · Accepted solution]

No, that's not how it works because vCSA doesn't provide an NTP server function. So you need NTP to be in if you want proper time keeping. Even in secured environments, there's no way around that.

[HFMudd]

The host provides time to it's registered VMs so seems logical that the the higher management tier would provide the same to the registered hosts simply for the sake of logs and components all to be sync'd.

Thanks,

[daphnissov]

But that mechanism (which is VMtools) provides it in one direction. It doesn't get bounced off the vCSA as well.

[HFMudd]

Understood, thanks for the answer