Jason Dusek wrote: > At my work, we're using Amazon EC2 to host all services. The > clock is set on our 'instances' by whatever machine the > instance is running on -- as is usually the case with Xen.
Virtual machines systems tend to run time at a variable rate! There is, somewhere a couple of months back, a link to a VMWare paper on how it distorts time. > Were all the instances definitely on the same Xen host, I > could be comfortable saying their clocks were synched pretty > closely; but at present, that is not the case and it's not > clear to me how close the clocks will be on instances across > an EC2 data center (or across data centers). Is there a way to > run NTP on two servers so that they can calculate their mutual > time difference? "ntpdate -d" might be as good, for that application. You will be able to set bounds on the time difference, but you won't know how much is true difference, and how much is the result of asymmetric propagation delays in the NTP packets. On virtual machines, scheduling of the virtual machines may introduce significant skewing of propagation times. Also, you may find you get almost zero round trip times when they were actually quite large, because time was not passing on the sending virtual machine. If you want approximately right time on a virtual machine, you need to NTP synchronise the hosts and run the equivalent of VMWare tools. You may find that only the virtual RTC actually has good time. > > -- > _jsn _______________________________________________ questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
