We are using a test ESXi 5.1 environment that consists of 3 hosts with vCenter running as a VM (Win2008).
Our environment has no internet connectivity and there are no servers on the network other than the esx hosts.
I would like to be able to synchronize my host clocks automatically but am not sure which option is best given my enviroinment.
Option A - Use the vcenter VM as the NTP server. Based on what I have read so far this is not a good idea. I tried it anyway and set the NTP server for all hosts to the vcenter IP and set the group policy permissions for NTP on the Win2008 guest OS. I also enabled the client and started the services. This did not work.
Option B - Use one of the hosts as the NTP server. I tried adding the IP address of host 1 as the NTP server on hosts 2 & 3 but that did not work either.
I am pretty new to ESX so I likely missed settings when I tried both options above. I have no Linux experience so any how-to advice using the GUI would be really helpful.
Is there better option other than the two above?
