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ESXi 4.1 NTP / Active Directory

September 1, 2010 by FrankBrix 2 Comments

I was having trouble getting the time right on my ESXi hosts. Every hosts had NTP enabled and 4 external NTP servers was added.

No matter what I did the time was running 4 minutes too fast. After some digging around I finally figured what the problem was.

1. My ESXi servers were added to my active directory so I could login with my windows users directly to the host.

2. My domain controller was syncing the time through VMware tools with the host. (So my DC was running 4 minutes too fast as well) (I know best practise is NOT to sync time through VMware tools)

I suspected that my ESXi hosts were syncing with my DC instead of NTP. To verifiy I removed my ESXi hosts from the domain and voila the time was right again!

Conclusion: If your ESXi hosts has been added to a domain it will sync it time to the domain and ignore the NTP settings. Set your primary DC to sync from an external source and you will be alright.

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Comments

  1. Patrick says

    May 12, 2011 at 04:44

    I actually ran across this issue last week due to the PDC running as a VM causing this circular time issue where systems will slowly gain/loose time. We were about 12 minutes behind before correcting the issue.

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  1. Tweets that mention ESXi 4.1 NTP / Active Directory « vFrank -- Topsy.com says:
    September 1, 2010 at 10:57

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Lars Troen, Frank Brix Pedersen. Frank Brix Pedersen said: New blog post. ESXi and time sync http://bit.ly/9EajDB […]

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