{"id":803,"date":"2012-11-18T13:34:14","date_gmt":"2012-11-18T02:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/?p=803"},"modified":"2012-11-18T13:34:14","modified_gmt":"2012-11-18T02:34:14","slug":"windows-2008-server-virtual-server-clock-resets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/2012\/11\/windows-2008-server-virtual-server-clock-resets\/","title":{"rendered":"Windows 2008 Server virtual server clock resets"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There appears to be a lot of conflicting information about configuring Windows time on a virtualised Windows 2008 server. Some of this will stem from the variety of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hypervisor\">hypervisors <\/a>in use.<\/p>\n<p>In this case the Windows 2008 server is running under Hyper-V and it appears to be hitting the hardware clock of the host system on every restart.<\/p>\n<p>So depending on what you read you will find\u00a0advise to <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/virtual_pc_guy\/archive\/2010\/11\/19\/time-synchronization-in-hyper-v.aspx\">manage via the Hyper-V<\/a>\u00a0management in the host (which\u00a0sometimes is not accessible in hosted environments) or to <a href=\"http:\/\/social.technet.microsoft.com\/Forums\/en-US\/winserverhyperv\/thread\/d4d65433-8da6-4e67-8811-541a9ad22848\">just turn off the Hyper-V sync<\/a> (depending on which of the posts you believe on that page) and work on the NTP settings.<\/p>\n<p>For this VPS I don&#8217;t have access to the Hyper-V and don&#8217;t know what the settings are.<\/p>\n<p>In summary I have modified the w32time setting to use an external ntp server at the command prompt rather than relying on the graphical interface that reported the correct settings but running a w32tm query suggested different settings existed.<\/p>\n<p>From a command prompt:<\/p>\n<p>[text]<\/p>\n<p>w32tm \/query \/status   # this just confirmed that the server was not using the ntp server that was set in the graphical interface<\/p>\n<p>w32tm \/config \/syncfromflags:manual \/manualpeerlist:0.pool.ntp.org<\/p>\n<p>w32tm \/query \/status   # confirm changes<\/p>\n<p>[\/text]<\/p>\n<p>and with Regedit (this is possibly redundant but I&#8217;d prefer to see more frequent checks for NTP than 24 hours and 15 minutes seems ok. Could easily be an hour using 3600 as the setting.)<\/p>\n<p>[text]<\/p>\n<p>HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesW32TimeTimeProvidersNtpClient (SpecialPollInterval) \u00a0\u00a0 and modified Decimal value to 900 (15 minutes)<\/p>\n<p>[\/text]<\/p>\n<p>And after 2 restarts this morning it all appears to have resolved correctly and the correct time zone hours are still being displayed.<\/p>\n<p>References for results:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.winsysadminblog.com\/2011\/06\/how-to-set-and-change-an-ntp-time-source-in-windows-server-2008-r2-sbs-2011-and-vanilla-server\/\">Managing the NTP settings under Windows 2008<\/a>\u00a0provided the basic commands and I also read <a href=\"http:\/\/defaultreasoning.com\/2009\/11\/16\/synchronize-time-with-external-ntp-server-on-windows-server-2008-r2\/\">this<\/a>\u00a0but the\u00a0syntax for 3 sources did not work (I did not try to work out why as I am ok with one NTP server selected).<\/p>\n<p>This <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tomshardware.com\/forum\/55562-45-changing-frequency-internet-time-synchronisation\">page provided the regedit<\/a> info that I needed to get the NTP working every 15 minutes rather than 7 days apart.<\/p>\n<p>This <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aperture.ro\/index.php\/2009\/01\/windows-time-sync-hyper-v-enabled-domain-controller-dilemma\/\">blog post over at Apeture<\/a> was a funny read and includes some more registry info which helped to clarify the NTP settings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There appears to be a lot of conflicting information about configuring Windows time on a virtualised Windows 2008 server. Some of this will stem from the variety of hypervisors in use. In this case the Windows 2008 server is running under Hyper-V and it appears to be hitting the hardware clock of the host system [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-windows-servers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howden.net.au\/thowden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}