vSphere ESXi 7.0 U3 and later versions configuration files for NTP and PTP can no longer be edited

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

As part of the bigger goal of moving away from using stickybit files, VMware have moved the configuration stored in these files to ConfigStore. These files are used just as cache files by the services, the configurations in these files are now stored in the ConfigStore. The ConfigStore is the single source of truth in ESXi 7.0 Update 3 and later.

Symptoms:

The ESXi configuration files /etc/ntp.conf and /etc/ptp.conf can no longer be edited directly.
It is no longer possible to make changes to NTP, PTP by editing these config files directly. From ESXi 7.0 Update 3, files under /etc are read-only and edits do not persist across reboot.

Environment

• VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.3
   
• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x

Resolution

Use the following esxcli commands to configure NTP, PTP on ESXi. The commands have been modified to read/write to configstore instead of interacting with a stickybit file.

To display current configuration:

• # esxcli system ntp get
  Here is a typical output:
     Enabled: true  <== NTP service is enabled
     Loglevel: warning
     PID: ######  <== PID of the NTP daemon ntpd
     Runtime Seconds: ##  <== Runtime in seconds
     Servers: ###.###.###.###  <== NTP server name or IP address
     Service Providing Kernel Time: Network Time Protocol
     Time Service Enabled: true
     Time Synchronized: true  <== Time synchronization is successful.
  
  
• #  esxcli system ptp get

To change configuration:

• # esxcli system ntp set
  1. Run the command "esxcli system ntp set --help" to view the list of configurable options.
  2. To specify a NTP server along with optional parameters, refer to the KB 313810 
  3. To specify a single NTP server without any additional parameters, run the command "esxcli system ntp set -s NTP_server -e 1"
  4. To specify multiple NTP servers, run the command "esxcli system ntp set -s NTP_server1 -s NTP_server2 -e 1"
  5. These settings will persist across host reboots.   
• # esxcli system ptp set