Red Hat VMs has incorrect time after reboot leading to time drift between VMs

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

After a Red Hat virtual machine is rebooted the time is wrong and not syncing with NTP. 

Resolution

In standard Red Hat deployments, the chronyd service automatically synchronizes the system time to the RTC (real time clock). This behavior is enabled by the rtcsync directive located in /etc/chrony.conf

 

Disabling or removing this parameter causes the virtual RTC to drift from the NTP-synchronized system time. Consequently, upon reboot, the operating system will initialize using this inaccurate RTC value. Because chronyd may require a significant amount of time to fully resynchronize, critical applications may launch with incorrect timestamps during this interval.