I have a handful of x86_64 Centos 5.1 guests running on ESX 3.5 hosts. In the rest of our environment, we use ntpd to keep our clocks in sync. For extra redundancy I also have vmware guests sync with the host as well. This works well for all our older 2.4 kernel guests, but the 2.6 kernel guests never actually sync with the ntp server. They just sit there in the .INIT. stage:
remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter
==============================================================================
ntp1.server .INIT. 16 u 80 128 0 0.000 0.000 0.000
ntp2.server .INIT. 16 u 81 128 0 0.000 0.000 0.000
ntp3.server .INIT. 16 u 81 128 0 0.000 0.000 0.000
ntp4.server .INIT. 16 u 81 128 0 0.000 0.000 0.000
As a work-around I have disabled ntpd on these CentOS 5.1 servers and have them run ntpdate every 5 minutes via a cron job.
Is there a better way to handle this situation? I'd prefer to have the guests configured the same as all my other servers, but if NTPD can't sync there's not much point in running it at all.
