This may have been covered in the past, but not specific to my scenario I don't believe. We have ESXi hosts, vCD, and vCNS all pointing to an external source (corporate NTP server) but the Windows Server VMs that run vCenter, vCenter Chargeback, and SQL all say they are running local CMOS time (all VMs are domain members). I have forced some of them to go straight to the external source for time and skip the domain controller, but it brought some interesting questions to the forefront.
How should this be handled and where these VMs are getting their time from? Are they getting time from VMware Tools or are they getting it from the domain controller?
I believe they are getting their time from the domain controller > which in turn in pointing to the external source (corp NTP server), but what is preferred method of handling this?
Source A: External Time Source (Corporate NTP Server)
Source B: Domain Controller (Sourcing time from Source A)
Source C: VMware Tools