What’s New in vSphere 7.0 : Precision Clock

When you think of designing an IT Environment for Financial Sector, you often pay very close attention to Time Services as the Entire financial infrastructure is based on this. Financial services applications, the timestamps on transactions and records must be precise. 

The financial sector must adhere to many regulations to time-stamp records and transactions. These time-stamps must be accurate within the 1-second range.

Precision Clock is a virtual device introduced in vSphere 7.0, which enabled the Guest OS to use Precision Clock Time as a reference time.

 

Features:

  • Precision Clock is not directly involved in guest OS time synchronization.
  • Precision Clock presents the ESXi host’s system time to the guest OS.
  • To provide better time synchronization, Precision Clock bypasses the virtual networking stack and the guest networking stack.
  • Precision Clock helps the guest VM, to achieve clock accuracy in the 1-millisecond range.

 

Add a Precision Clock Device to a Virtual Machine

  1. Right-click a virtual machine from the vSphere Client inventory and select Edit Settings.
  2. On the Virtual Hardware tab, click Add New Device, and from the drop-down menu select Precision Clock.
  3. The Precision Clock device appears in the Virtual Hardware devices list.
  4. Select the time synchronization protocol and click OK

 

Precision Clock Precision Clock

 

Precision Clock has the following optional device settings:

  • Host system time (Auto): Precision Clock automatically detects the ESXi host’s time-sync protocol and presents the time to the guest OS.
  • Host system time (NTP): Precision Clock requires that the ESXi host’s time-sync protocol is NTP.
  • Host system time (PTP): Precision Clock requires that the ESXi host’s time-sync protocol is PTP.

 

Precision Clock Restrictions

  • Precision Clock has the following restrictions:
  • If the time-sync protocol of the ESXi host and the optional device settings of Precision Clock does not match, the VM fails to power on.
  • If VMs are running on the ESXi host, the time-sync protocol of the ESXi host cannot be changed.

 

For more information on vSphere 7.0 Please refer to : https://knowitlikepro.com/category/vmware/whats-new-in-vsphere-7-0/

Ashutosh Dixit

I am currently working as a Senior Technical Support Engineer with VMware Premier Services for Telco. Before this, I worked as a Technical Lead with Microsoft Enterprise Platform Support for Production and Premier Support. I am an expert in High-Availability, Deployments, and VMware Core technology along with Tanzu and Horizon.

Leave a Reply