It seems the consensus is to abide by the recommended approach (both by VMware and Red Hat) and use ntpd as intended. That is to say, a constantly running daemon. What we'll have to work out is the server-side of it. Chances of getting hardware just to run NTP are slim and we don't have control over how the VMware hosts are configured so we can only focus on how we configure our VMs. One would think we'd be able to just point to the NTP servers the provider uses, but for some reason or another that isn't an option. I may have to revisit it, though.
-Mathew "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." - God; Futurama "We'll get along much better once you accept that you're wrong and neither am I." - Me On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 6:37 AM, David Bronder <[email protected]> wrote: > On 11/20/2014 08:05 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) wrote: > > > > BTW, on debian/ubuntu systems, it's sufficient to "apt-get -y install > open-vm-tools" instead of building vmware-tools the usual way. > > > > Last I knew, redhat systems still need to build vmware-tools the usual > way, but I haven't checked for the existence of open-vm-tools in rhel7. > Maybe it exists now. > > > > As an alternative to installing/building VMware Tools through the image and > interface provided in ESXi and vCenter for various RHEL/CentOS, SUSE and > Ubuntu versions (those without open-vm-tools, which RHEL 7 now includes and > VMware supports the use of), you can look at the VMware Tools Operating > System Specific Packages (OSP). > > https://www.vmware.com/support/packages > > These are provided in the OSes' respective packaging formats (e.g. RPM). > We > use these (sync'd into our RHN Satellite) for our RHEL environment so we > can > manage the Tools through Satellite like most of our other patching. (Note > that the OSP Tools report in vCenter as "3rd party/unmanaged".) > > (One caveat on the OSPs, though. VMware has had trouble over the years > with > learning how to properly package and version their OSP RPMs, both within > the > Tools for a particular ESXi or guest OS version and across ESXi or guest OS > versions, resulting in occasional conflicts between dissimilar packages > with > identical RPM names and versions. They're getting better, but I think I'm > still seeing issues.) > > As far as timekeeping, we've had no trouble with running ntpd normally in > our > RHEL VMs lately. Some years back, we had issues (probably ESX 3.x but > maybe > also 4.x, and RHEL 3 or 4, and maybe early 5, but details are fuzzy now), > which we worked around with tips from the (now old) VMware whitepaper on > timekeeping with Linux VMs (presumably since replaced by the > already-mentioned KB article). Definitely no problems with later RHEL 5 or > newer on ESXi 5.0/5.5, though. > > =Dave > > -- > Hello World. David Bronder - Systems > Architect > Segmentation Fault ITS-EI, Univ. of > Iowa > Core dumped, disk trashed, quota filled, soda warm. > [email protected] >
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