vSphere 5.1 VMware Tools NTP Settings

In earlier versions of VMware vSphere, many of us used to configure VMware tools settings by double clicking VMware tools inside the guest OS. This was most often used to configure NTP in the Virtual Machine VMware tools. Just to remind you of what that looked like:

Alright if you try to do the same in vSphere 5.1, you will be surprised that you will not have any options to choose when double clicking on VMware tools inside the guest OS. What you will get will look like the below screen shot:

Maybe what I have mentioned so far is already what you know and its why you got here. Now let’s cover how you can configure your VMware Tools to sync the VM time with your host. The way this is done in vSphere 5.1 is a bit different. You actually don’t need to login to the VM to change VMware tools setting & in most use cases the VMware Tools NTP Sync setting, but now you can do it from the VMware setting page. The VMware tools settings now can be accessed  in Virtual Machine –> Edit Settings –> Options –> VMware Tools. The below screenshot show just how to set it up.

As you can see the “Synchronize guest time with host” has been moved to the VM settings window rather than the VMware tools screen inside the OS where it used to be. The main benefits of this, the virtual infrastructure team does not have to have permissions to login to the VM to be able to control time synchronization which can be a great asset for any secure environment, where the Virtual infrastructure admin has no access to guest OS running in a VM. As I have been asked about this increasingly lately, I thought I would share it on here for every one to benefit of it!