

Configuring NTP for a deployment¶

Note

If you are on Azure, you cannot change NTP configuration because it will read it from a local PTP device. For more information on recommended azure configuration using chrony, see here.

Configuring NTP servers on all deployments¶

To configure NTP servers for all VMs on all deployments, add an ntp section to the agent env in your bosh director manifest. For example:

instance_groups
- name: bosh
  ...
  properties:
    agent:
      env:
        bosh:
          ntp:
          - time1.google.com
          - time2.google.com
          - time3.google.com
          - time4.google.com

This will configure the agent to update your NTP configuration before synchronizing its clock with the specified NTP servers.

Configuring NTP servers in the director itself¶

The bosh director is often deployed using bosh create-env. For VMs deployed using bosh create-env, ntp should be configured by adding an ntp section to the resource_pools in the create-env manifest For example:

resource_pools:
- env:
    bosh:
      ntp:
      - time1.google.com
      - time2.google.com
      - time3.google.com
      - time4.google.com
  name: vms
  network: default

This will have the same agent behavior as changing the agent.env.bosh.ntp in a director manifest.

At this point you should know enough to configure NTP on your VMs. The rest of this document is explaining details or exceptions.

It is also possible to configure the agent env on an instance-group basis¶

If you wanted to configure the NTP servers specifically for one instance group in a deployment you can do so using env.bosh.ntp property on that instance group in its deployment manifest.

In order to completely disable NTP client configuration on one instance group, specify an empty list env.bosh.ntp=[] on the instance group, and also configure an empty ntp list in the bosh director default configuration of the cpi-release, for example vsphere-cpi

Configuring NTP via CPI job properties is DEPRECATED¶

If you configure NTP on an instance group that has CPI jobs, some CPIs will pick up that configuration and place it in the agent settings on deployed VMs. The agent will detect those settings and use them as a fallback in the event that the agent env does not include NTP configuration. This configuration style is deprecated since it is not guaranteed to take precedence and the configuration style may vary across IaaSes.