NTP connectivity error in the system health section on Cloud Director Availability 4.x

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• In the system health section of any of the Cloud Director Availability services you can see an error under NTP configuration.
• To confirm you are facing this issue you can follow this steps:

1. SSH to the affected appliance.
2. Login using the root account and password
3. run: systemctl status systemd-timesyncd.service

• on the previous command you see entries similar to:

Server has too large root distance. Disconnecting.

Environment

VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.x

Cause

This issue occurs when the NTP server has too large of a root distance to the appliance to properly synchronize the time based on the systemd-timesync.service default values

Resolution

To resolve this issue move the appliances closer to the NTP server so the root distance decreases.

Workaround:
To workaround this issue you can increase the default maximum root distance allowed by the systemd-timesync service

1. SSH to the affected appliance.
2. Login using the root account and password
3. Backup the timesyncd.conf

cp /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf.bkp

4. vi /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf
5. Remove the "#" in front of the line #RootDistanceMaxSec=5
6. Increase RootDistanceMaxSec=5 to RootDistanceMaxSec=30
7. Save the changes using ":wq!"
8. Restart the systemd-timesync.service

systemctl restart systemd-timesync.service

9. After 30 seconds refresh the Cloud Director Availability service UI in the browser and confirm the NTP error is gone.