Well today I discovered that one of the ESX hosts in our cluster did not have its NTP settings correctly configured, although it did take me a little while to figure it out.

We have a 2003 guest box on the host which when I logged onto it to do some work was displaying a totally wrong date and time.  So I set it back manually in the OS (we dont use DHCP for our server subnet). Did not think much of it until 10 minutes later all of a sudden the correct date and time reverted back to the wrong date and time. I checked the 2003 boxes settings again and it wasnt synching its time with any internet NTP server which is how we like it. So I had a look at the vmware tools installed on the box and sure enough that was not set to synch time with the host so again I ruled that out.

So I merrily set the date and time again and went on my way and sure enough in another 10 minutes the date/time had reverted. so I checked the host and found that NTP was not enabled and was displaying the same date and time as the 2003 guest OS. I set up NTP on the host and this cured the issue.

I do find it somewhat strange that even though the guest was not set to sync date/time with the host it still did it, presumably after the w32 service failed to sync with an online ntp service the VMware tools took over and synched it anyway.

Weird, I feel a bit of googling coming on!

DRWHOWATCH