I have a Windows 2008 server – 32bit – running in an ESX environment.
I can manually sync the time to a time server (time.microsoft.com, tick.gatech.edu, or any other time server) and the time is properly set and displayed in the system tray clock. I am also setting the time zone correctly to Eastern Time – Adjusted for DST.
Everything looks good at this point.
However, if I restart the system then the system clock is set 4 hours earlier. (i.e. 4:00 PM real time becomes 12:00PM on the system).
I then have to either force a time resync or mannual set the time to the correct hour. Minutes are not affected — but the time is set exactly 4 hours back.
This is driving me nuts and I'm looking for a solution to this. Unfortunatly several key tasks on this server are time sensitive and this is causing a real problem.
I have doubled checked that the VMtools is not set to sync the clock to the ESX server.
Thanks for any help.
Best Answer
We had the exact problem last week. Turns out the time of the ESX host really does matter, as that's what the server starts with when it is reset (which we found out after Microsoft patch-reboots). What was really suspicious was that it kept resetting to the same timescale back after the reboots. In your case it is now-4h, in our case it was Now-42days. Once we got the ESX host's time straightened out, it stopped doing that and the normal Windows time-sync was able to keep it on time.