Working in my lab today, I was having some issues with deploying virtual machines within vCloud Director.

I remember a while ago that Chris Colotti had written an article about the importance of NTP with vCloud Director.  I thought I had better syncronize the vCNSM (formally vShield Manager), vCenter Appliance, and vCloud Director.

Setting NTP on a vCD cell and vCNS Manager is a very simple task, but how do you do it on the vCenter Appliance?  There is no option through the configuration UI.  A quick google showed me this page within the vSphere 5.1 documentation center.

Procedure

Log into the vCenter Server Appliance as root.
From a command line, enter the following commands to configure and start an NTP client.

yast2 ntp-client add server=your_chosen_time_server
yast2 ntp-client enable

Enter the following command to request immediate synchronization with the time server.

sntp -P no -r your_chosen_time_server

However following this guide, I received the error:

Again I hit google, and found this bugzilla page by Novell. It states this issue is fixed, but doesnt show you how to fix the problem.

So what do I do know? Well the vCenter Appliance is based on SuSE linux, so I thought I would try simply configuring NTP manually. These are the steps I took to configure NTP.

Edit the file /etc/ntp.conf and add the following line

You then need to initialize NTP by issuing the command

I don’t know if this is a random issue, or whether it is a known bug. There appeared to be limited information on the internet for it.