That's good to hear. It at least validates what we are doing to some extent. Do you happen to know which documentation makes that recommendation? Everything we've found so far never mentions ntpdate.
Side note, I find it odd that VMware recommends against using their tools for time sync. Why include it then? -Mathew "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." - God; Futurama "We'll get along much better once you accept that you're wrong and neither am I." - Me On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 11:55 AM, Matt Simmons <msimm...@lopsa.org> wrote: > As of a major version ago on ESXi, it was considered best practice to run > ntpdate in a cron rather than ntpd on VMs, particularly if you weren't > using the most up-to-date VMware tools (and I believe they recommended the > VMware version, rather than open-vm tools). > > I've also seen that behavior when a VM Host had a screwed up NTP config. > > I haven't noticed any significant clock skew during a vmotion, but I've > never checked it. I can give it a shot if you'd like. > > --Matt > > > On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 4:50 PM, Mathew Snyder <mathew.sny...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> We are currently in a situation where we are being pressured to >> re-engineer our NTP service. We currently host it, along with other >> services, on Windows DCs. Our initial plan is to move NTP off of those >> servers and host it on dedicated Linux servers. >> >> We likely won't get approval for hardware to host NTP and will thus have >> to rely on VMs. This poses a few concerns such as: How will a Vmotion >> affect the service? What happens if access to the sources that we use is >> lost (for whatever reason)? >> >> In the past, all of our VMs would run ntpd normally. That is, as a >> constantly running daemon.. However, we found that time was drifting >> significantly to the tune of several seconds a day on several servers. We >> never figured out why it was happening. Instead, we found that using a cron >> job which runs /usr/sbin/ntpd every five minutes kept time synced up >> nicely. We haven't had any issues since. >> >> However, now Red Hat is telling us we should (need) to be running ntpd as >> a daemon because they are seeing timing issues. Interestingly, this was >> never brought to the attention of us platform engineers so I don't know how >> bad the problem is or how many servers are affected. >> >> The problem could be VMware Tools conflicting with ntpd. But again, we >> don't know what the problem is. Only that we have a workaround-type >> solution that we're being told we have to replace. >> >> This leads to my question to the list: those of you who have cloud >> environments based on VMware solutions, how do you keep time in sync? What >> issues have you encountered and how did you solve those problems? What can >> you recommend for a virtualized NTP solution? >> >> >> -Mathew >> >> "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at >> all." - God; Futurama >> >> "We'll get along much better once you accept that you're wrong and >> neither am I." - Me >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Tech mailing list >> Tech@lists.lopsa.org >> https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech >> This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators >> http://lopsa.org/ >> >> >
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