I was doing some tests in my lab and while deploying a new VCSA 6.0 I received an error that firstboot was unsuccessful. Not really a great error message if you ask me but okay. I had already validated DNS twice before I got started, but I checked it again just in case… DNS was all good, what else could it be? Figured NTP could be another problem and my friend William Lam confirmed that. I checked the host if NTP was configured and it was not for some reason. So I configured NTP on my ESXi hosts which was straight forward, but what about the VCSA I had deployed? Also not too complicated, I logged in via SSH and did the following:
- ntp.get
Will show “Status: Down” - ntp.server.add –servers 10.17.0.1
This configures VCSA to fetch the time from ntp server to 10.17.0.1 - timesync.set –mode NTP
Make sure that the time sync is set to ntp - ntp.get
Should show “Status: Up”
That should do it… By the way, you can simply check “resolv.conf” for DNS to see how it is configured today, also look at “hosts” for the host name etc.
Duncan, i’ve also found in my lab that ntp can only be effectively configured on the ESXi hosts via the webclient access to the vcenter with version 6 so far. Whilst the old windows c# client still presents the time configuration option for the host it seems to error when setting the ntp server. (same ntp server works via webclient).
Were you able to set ntp via the windows client?