VM time and date (NTP) incorrect

Scenario

Post start, you find your VM’s time and date is not up to date. Sometimes off by weeks or months.

Common Causes

1. Rarely the screensaver inside of the VM turning on can disable time sync.
2. The VM can go to sleep if it’s long-running and cause NTP to get out of sync.
3. This happens when the sudo sntp -sS time.apple.com fails inside of the VM post-start. We’ve disabled automatic NTP syncing to support suspended VM states (it causes problems), so our addons will execute the sntp command post-start.
   • Addons log to /var/log/anka.log inside of the VM and may indicate/log what went wrong.

Notes about our addons and NTP:

• Our guest addons disable time sync for the VM’s OS settings no matter what.
• Our addons by default communicate with the host to get the date/time and use that for the VM (not using NTP at all) (set as 1)
• Our addons can execute the sntp sync command with time.apple.com if you set anka config time_sync to 2, post boot.

Solution

1. Set screensaver to Never.
2. Enable “Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off” under Energy settings.
3. You can manually run sudo sntp -sS time.apple.com in your jobs to ensure macOS is synced properly.

Still experiencing problems?

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