Good afternoon. I hope you’re all staying safe and healthy in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I had someone reach out to me yesterday with a need to script NTP configuration on ESXi hosts. He had all of the NTP configuration working except enabling the ntpd daemon to start automatically with the host. That’s easy enough I said. I use the following PowerCLI script block to configure many of my vSphere hosts. Row three takes care of automatically starting the daemon.
Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostFirewallException | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq "NTP client"} |Set-VMHostFirewallException -Enabled:$true
Get-VMHost | Get-VmHostService | Where-Object {$_.key -eq "ntpd"} | Start-VMHostService
Get-VMhost | Get-VmHostService | Where-Object {$_.key -eq "ntpd"} | Set-VMHostService -policy "on"
Get-VMHost | Get-VmHostService | Where-Object {$_.key -eq "ntpd"}
Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostFirewallException | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq "NTP client"}
However, he didn’t want to use PowerCLI – he needed an ESXi command line method. He had scoured the internet finding no solution and actually turned up many discussions saying it can’t be done.
I dug deep into my ESX 3.5.0 build document, last updated 1/23/10 (just prior to my VCDX defense which occurred in early February 2010). ‘Try this”, I said:
chkconfig ntpd on
He responded that it didn’t work. He wants the UI to show the NTP Service startup policy was Start and stop with host. It was still grayed out showing Start and stop manually.
“Ok do this – restart hostd”:
/etc/init.d/hostd restart
That worked and was likely the missing step from many of the forum threads saying it this can’t be done.
