Hi,
we are hosting a multi tenant vSphere platform, with VMs from multiple customers.
Some of these customers do have their own NTP Servers and are still running VMs/bare metal servers on premise.
The ESXi hosts and every vSphere management server we have uses our own NTP servers.
Some of our customers which we do the management of all their VMs and services (full service provider) use these NTP servers of ours, too.
The problem is, that those customers, who do not use our NTP servers, sometimes have different system times on their own servers, than on the ones we provide for them.
As long as the VMs running in our data center are in sync with their NTP servers, nothing is wrong.
But as soon as we do a vMotion, add a virtual disk or a vNIC, the system time of the VM gets changed to the time of the ESXi host it is running on.
I am aware of the possibility to disable this behaviour in the VMX file, but that doesn't seem to be an elegant solution, as we want to deploy all of our VMs in a standardized configuration (from the VM side, customers can still customize the guest operating system as they wish).
Is there any advice or best practice from someone who is running a similar environment?