01 October 2010 ~ 7 Comments

Configure your time / NTP server on ESXi

Tutorials

The correct time is essential to your ESXi server, you will need it for a variety of reasons (syslog, iscsi authentication and Security) and your Virtual Clients.
A NTP server is the right service for job. It’s allready builtin, you just need to enable it.

Enable the builtin NTP Server

1. Start your VMware Infrastructure Client

2. Select your server and click on the Configuration tab

3. Click on Time configuration

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4. Click on Properties on the right side of the screen

5. Click on Options

6. Add a new NTP server on the NTP Settings tab, for example ntp.pool.org

ntp_2

 

7. Click on the General tab and set the startup Policy to Start automatically

ntp_3

 8. Last but not least Start the Service

Once you have installed a virtual client and you have installed the VMware tools, you just have set your timezone … the rest will be set automatically.

You’re all set now!

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7 Responses to “Configure your time / NTP server on ESXi”

  1. Troy 13 October 2010 at 16:52 Permalink

    Have you ever tried setting this to use a server within the network? I.E. I have a 2008 R2 server that I will sync with an NIST server, then make the 2008 R2 server a reliable time source, would this allow me to use a local IP or server name, and would the 2008 server actually supply the time to the esxi box?

  2. martin 29 December 2010 at 14:01 Permalink

    Hi Troy,

    Sorry i wasn’t able to answer your question, but this week i took some time to test your solution .. this isn’t a problem.

    A short walktrough :
    I configured my 2008R2 domain controller as a time server which got his time from the internet. In my VMware vSphere server i configured the correct dns settings so my box can find it on it’s FQDN.
    Next i setup my box to get its time from the Domain Controller and the time changed …

    Cheers !

  3. Pedros-DAR 10 February 2011 at 11:48 Permalink

    i did the same but still my ESXi4.1 is not time syncing with my domain controller :(

  4. Pedros-DAR 10 February 2011 at 23:14 Permalink

    Few days ago, some Virtual Machines had their windows clock not-synced with the domain clock and desktops clock.
    The reason behind this was that every time a VM is migrated or rebooted it resync it windows clock with the ESX-physical hypervisor clock.
    The ESX hypervisor clock seemed to be not accurate 100% ( not syncing with a reliable NTP server) and thus some VMs time was not accurate and not in-sync with the domain.

    The solution is to configure all ESX servers’ clock to sync with the domain clock ( as any other machine-joined domain will do).

    So, all our ESX servers now have their NTP servers = dc1.domainname.com & dc2.domainname.com.
    Note: ANY domain controller serves as NTP server & can respond to NTP client requests.

  5. vRico 15 March 2011 at 15:49 Permalink

    Anyone know how to script this into the %firstboot of the KS file?

  6. hugo 12 August 2011 at 14:48 Permalink

    I even had the weirdest errors while installing Exchange 2010.
    Always ntp your esxi host AND enable the time sync between the esxi host and the virtual machine!

    Thnx!


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