I have recently deployed 2 ESXi 4.1 hosts and added our virtual machines on it. Everything went smooth except for NTP client configuration : There is no synchronization happening, ever.
Our Windows 2008 Domain Controller (VM) is acting as a NTP server. Then we have one physical server running Windows 2008 to sync with Windows 2008 DC through w32time. And we setup the physical Windows 2008 server as a time server as well. All windows can sync with those two servers except ESXi server.
The interesting thing we found here is if we set internet access on the physical Windows 2008 server to sync with external public NTP clock, then ESXi can sync with the physical Windows 2008 server. But if we setup this physical Windows 2008 server no sync or just sync with WIN2K8 DC(VM), ESXi will not sync with anything.
So my first question is the internet public NTP server access necessary for ESXi client to sync time. Because unfortunately we don't have any internet access available on our system, what we have is just communicate to third party server to get time from WIN2K8 DC(VM). Or what kind of registery settings can change inside the windows or any settings inside ESXi.
The second question is if internet is necessary, then can we use powercli or any other scripts to change the host clock/time when we can got time from WIN2K8 DC(VM) or physical Windows 2008 server. If so, what can we do? Or we can got any third party NTP server software to be a ESXi timer server and use the widnwos server time.
Thanks a lot!