Time Running Slow on Virtual Servers

To some this may be a no brainer, and in fairness we found the cause and fixed it 5 minutes, but to some it may be a head scratcher.

We have a load of servers all running on Windows 2008 R2 and on ESX Hosts. The time on some servers is running slow by up to 3 minutes on the affected servers and perfectly in sync with the time source we use on the others. So the question is why is the time running slow on some? But this was not always the case for the same servers.

The time source is configured correctly on the servers
The Time source Server is correct as is the actual time source

As DRS kicked in for some of the affected servers and they moved to new hosts the time was corrected, but those that didn’t move, they stayed out of sync.

As it turns out we had one ESX Host that did not have the NTP feature configured which meant the servers reported the ESX Hosts time. So once this was set up properly all the servers caught up and matched the correct time.

Hope this helps.