Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Time Synchronize on VM and ESX

Time synchronize always important in every solution or platform. As ESX claim and advice the users to sync all the VM in ESX with the ESX host, I am here to explain why we shouldn't do this.

  1. Recent major bugs from VMware had encountered exprie issue which disallow VM to be power on or Vmotion. What I had done personally is " stop the NTP synchronization from esx host, and change the date back to 5 days back before the VM expire". This easily solve my issue and allow me to Vmotion all the VM machine to another destination host without any interruption. Can you imagine if you sync all the VM with ESX host, you will lose this flexibility and in the big pain to figure out, how would you able to simplify the patch process to fix the bugs even VMware had released the bug fix
  2. I still do not see any potential issues with the current configuration that we sync all the VM and physical servers to multiple NTP servers we do have in our environment. Standardization always important as if we can minimize the different method of support and maintenance, it will help to reduce complexity.
  3. If you VM is running on windows, the VM will direct synchronize with the time servers in AD by default, and I don't really see the potential need to create another specify way to synchronize the time on the VM.

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