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Thursday, April 23, 2015

Exchange Servers Running on VMware Time Sync Errors

After standing up our new 3-node Exchange 2013 environment on brand new VM hosts, everything was humming along for a couple weeks, then all of sudden Exchange services on all nodes starting cratering, then the DAG crashed, then the DB's started dismounting.
After an hour of troubleshooting, we noticed that the time on each server were WAY off, and all over the place - they also didn't match their hosts' time. This is bad because if the time is more than 5 minutes off, Kerberos tickets fail...causing the service crashes. The DAG also has timeout limits, which the time out of sync affected.
Come to find out, the vSphere/ESX hosts didn't have any time server set to sync to.


Here's how to set your hosts to get time from an authoritative source:

Logon to vCenter and select your vSphere or ESX host.


Click the Configuration tab and then Time Configuration under Software

You'll see that the time on the vSphere host does not match the domain time shown on the Windows client running vCenter.

Click Properties in the top right corner of the Configuration tab to get to Time Configuration.

Click on Options and add a new NTP server that has accurate time; I would use your PDC emulator, since it should already be configured as an authoritative time source.


Select the checkbox to Restart NTP service to apply changes and click OK and OK

You will see that the vSphere/ESX host now has the correct time and is configured to use dcname.yourdomain.com as its time server.

On the VM guests themselves, within VMware Tools, under Options, put a check next to "Time synchronization between the virtual machine and the ESX Server"


You might need to restart the VM guests, but it usually works right away. 

And now your VM time will be right on!
 

2 comments:

  1. Awsome !!! you save my my day and job :) i had issue with exchnage 2016 no email in or out , powershell getting error exchnage 2016 WinRM cannot request because the input XML contain a syntax error , did manay restores played with services but this post with simple solution - Thanks so much

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