Time on Linux (Debian) guest under Hyper-V

[oh_noes]

Is it expected that Hyper-V sets the BIOS time of the Guest VM as the timezone of the Host Machine? Linux (all variants) and Unix expect the BIOS time to be in UTC and then adjust the $DATE accordingly based on $TIMEZONE/$DST.

This is a problem because I have a VM that could be loaded into anything. ESX, XEN or Hyper-V. ESX and XEN work without a problem. My Linux Guest boots, get UTC BIOS time and adjusts to the end user/application.

However, Hyper-V is bringing up my VM is coming up +/- $TIMEZONE. This is really bad because it's impossible for me cater for all environments and timezones. Even if I set UTC=no in /etc/defaults/rcS ... it's still not the answer because I will need the $TIMEZONE on the VM to match Hyper-V. Which I cannot predict/guess.

For the guys running Hyper-V ... is there an option I can turn "to enable UTC Date in VM BIOS"?

I'm sure others have run into this. Any ideas?

[DavidRa]

I am not aware of a way to do this. Most of the time Linux/BSD installs ask if the BIOS is UTC or local; if you specify local, it assumes BIOS time matches local time and doesn't offset the time within the Linux system.

In that case, the Linux time would match Hyper-V. Unless you're moving timezones all the time?

[mwil7034]

Doesn't Hyper-v have an ntp-type service or something to sync all the servers to using low level hooks?

vmware uses the vmtools packages to sync the clock to the host from memory.

Understandably during boot the dodgy time could pose issues but ntp-type service or even ntp itself would sort it out once the services are loaded.

I might be way off being late and all but just a suggestion.

Haven't deployed many hyperv installations lately and haven't come across this yet so I dont know what else sorry

[oh_noes]

Originally Posted by DavidRa

I am not aware of a way to do this. Most of the time Linux/BSD installs ask if the BIOS is UTC or local; if you specify local, it assumes BIOS time matches local time and doesn't offset the time within the Linux system.

In that case, the Linux time would match Hyper-V. Unless you're moving timezones all the time?

UTC=no is fine for most people who want to run a single Linux server inside Hyper-V.

But essentially I have a Virtual Appliance which needs to be started in any Hyper-V environment and it always boots with the wrong time. Obviously I can't assume or even guess what the Host Hypervisor timezone is.

The options I have is basically tell them there Hyper-V server needs to be in UTC, but this isn't possible for the majority of inexperienced windows admins.

Microsoft are fkn stupid so I don't have any options here.