Accurate and synchronized clocks are critical to proper functioning of the Avi Load Balancer Controller. Analytics functionality in the Controller relies on the fact that the Controllers and SEs are synchronized.

Controllers synchronize time from the configured NTP servers and the SEs in turn synchronize time from the Controllers. The VMware Tools service (vmtoolsd on Linux and Solaris guests) synchronizes the time in the guest operating system with the time in the host operating system. Issues arise when vmtoolsd is instructed by ESXi to overwrite the system time.

Resolution

ESXi time sync needs to be disabled for hosts on which the Controllers and SEs are spun up.



To avoid the time sync issue on the Controllers and SEs, Avi Load Balancer recommends the following solutions:

  1. Follow the steps in the VMware KB article Disabling Time Synchronization (1189) to completely disable ESX time sync for all possible scenarios on the Controller or SE virtual machines.

  2. Update the ESXi host time to be in sync with the NTP server configured.