[Samba] AD Integration drives me nuts

[Stan Hoeppner]

Mike put forth on 5/5/2010 4:20 PM:
> Hi Stan
> 
> Knew that... I have all of them pulling the same ntp source. Clock skew
> is > 3 secs! :)

That's great to hear.  For sooo long, too long, this guest clock issue
seemed to be "swept under the rug" by VMWare.  It's good to know that word
if finally out and that people are taking action.

If I may point out, you still should look into setting up the guests the
"proper" way.  Running an NTP daemon or cron'd ntpdate on each guest is
frowned upon.  That pdf may touch on the reasons why.  I haven't actually
read that one, but the predecessor doc from 2006.  It's best to get the
guest kernel setup right to work with a virtualized hw clock and run vmware
tools in the guest to keep the guest clock in sync.  You run ntpd on the ESX
host itself, and that keeps all guest clocks in sync after the guest has
been setup properly with vmware tools.

I wish I still had a copy of it to give you.  I wrote a lengthy and thorough
VMWare time sync document for my employer back in 2006 (ESX 2.5 days) due to
the massive clock problems we were experiencing.  Our entire server
environment was hosted on ESX including our Windows AD infrastructure, MSSQL
servers, and many Linux guests running iFolder server, Novel Zen server, a
few LAMP servers, etc.  Getting time sync setup properly solved about 50
different ongoing problems overnight.  As you can imagine, I'm a big
proponent of getting VMWare time sync setup properly.

-- 
Stan