vCenter Scheduled Tasks are incorrect after Daylight Savings Time

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

After a Daylight Saving Time (DST) change, you experience these symptoms:

• Scheduled Tasks display an incorrect next run time
• Scheduled Tasks times run one hour early or one hour late, depending on the direction of the DST change

Environment

Vmware vCenter Server 7.0.x

Vmware vCenter Server 8.0

Cause

vCenter stores and processes scheduled task times in UTC within the VCDB.

UTC does not have daylight savings advancements, so after the DST change, scheduled tasks run one hour earlier or later.

Resolution

Currently, Daylight Savings Time is not supported with Scheduled tasks for vCenter. See workaround below.

Workaround:
To workaround this issue the scheduled task hour must be changed plus or minus one hour from the vpx_sched_scheduler table. 

NOTE - Please ensure a valid vCenter backup or snapshot is taken prior to performing the steps below. For backups in an ELM environment please see "VMware vCenter in Enhanced Linked Mode pre-changes snapshot (online or offline) best practice" for full procedures.

1. Gather a SSH session to the VCSA
2. Run the following command to review the list of current scheduled tasks

psql -d VCDB -U postgres -c "select * from vpx_sched_scheduler;"

NOTE: Make special note of any tasks with an execution time of 0 or 23 hours. These are minimum and maximum numbers. Negative number values should NEVER be populated in this field and 24 would be nonexistent. If such tasks exist then the tasks must be moved individually.

3. Run one of the following commands (depending on the Daylight savings time of year) to change all scheduled tasks start time

To change all scheduled tasks to run one hour earlier (minus)

psql -d VCDB -U postgres -c "update vpx_sched_scheduler set schedule_hour = schedule_hour-1;"

To change all scheduled tasks to run one hour hour later (plus)

psql -d VCDB -U postgres -c "update vpx_sched_scheduler set schedule_hour = schedule_hour=+1;"

To change an individual task: (NOTE: the example below would change the task with id 301 to three hours later)

psql -d VCDB -U postgres -c "update vpx_sched_scheduler set schedule_hour = schedule_hour+3 where scheduledtask_id=301;"

For more than one task at a time:

psql -d VCDB -U postgres -c "update vpx_sched_scheduler set schedule_hour = schedule_hour+3 where scheduledtask_id=301,scheduledtask_id=302,scheduledtask_id=303;"

4. Restart VPXD service