Symptoms:
- In the vCenter Server Appliance Virtual Appliance Management Interface (VAMI), you cannot configure an NTP server unless the NTP server replies to ICMP traffic (ping).
- The "Edit Time Synchronization Settings" wizard displays, "<SERVER>, and <SERVER> are unreachable"
- If trying to configure "time.windows.com" and "time.nist.gov" as NTP servers, the applmgmt.log reports messages similar to:
/var/log/vmware/applmgmt/applmgmt.log
2018-11-07T00:03:08.843 [3001]DEBUG:vmware.appliance.timesync.impl:com.vmware.appliance.ntp.test(['time.windows.com', 'time.nist.gov'])
2018-11-07T00:03:08.843 [3001]DEBUG:vmware.appliance.networking.testUtils:Testing connection to: ['time.windows.com', 'time.nist.gov']
2018-11-07T00:03:10.993 [3001]DEBUG:vmware.appliance.networking.testUtils:ping out: b'PING time.microsoft.akadns.net (51.141.32.51) 56(84) bytes of data.\n\n--- time.microsoft.akadns.net ping statistics ---\n10 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 1871ms\n\n', err: b'', returncode: 1
2018-11-07T00:03:11.100 [3001]DEBUG:vmware.appliance.networking.testUtils:ping out: b'PING ntp1.glb.nist.gov (129.6.15.28) 56(84) bytes of data.\n\n--- ntp1.glb.nist.gov ping statistics ---\n10 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 1872ms\n\n', err: b'', returncode: 1
2018-11-07T00:03:11.101 [3001]DEBUG:root:TestRunStatuses: servers=['time.windows.com', 'time.nist.gov']
statuses=['SERVER_UNREACHABLE', 'SERVER_UNREACHABLE']
messages=[Structure('LocalizableMessage', dict(defaultMessage='Failed to reach server.', id='com.vmware.appliance.ping.failure', args=[])), Structure('LocalizableMessage', dict(defaultMessage='Failed to reach server.', id='com.vmware.appliance.ping.failure', args=[]))]