Press "Enter" to skip to content

Disabling VMware In-Guest Clock Updates

David Klee explains when VMware will update the internal clocks for VMs and shows how to disable that:

These time sync actions can move a guest’s time backwards as well as forwards. More details about this conflict of settings are found in VMware KB1189. If the host time is out of sync, such as when a BIOS battery fails, bad things can happen. This action is extremely detrimental to the state of SQL Server high availability features, such as Availability Groups and Failover Cluster Instances, which depend on the in-guest time closely aligning with the Active Directory synchronized time. This action must be explicitly disabled to ensure that these maintenance items do not trigger an unexpected failover of the SQL Server HA solution. To disable this action, perform the following tasks.

I’d imagine that the ideal would be everything being synched to a single NTP source.