Here are a few tips to make sure that your Subscriber can synchronize its clock to the Publisher via NTP. If during the addition of the Subsequent node (aka Subscriber) the NTP synchronization does not succeed, the Subscriber's installation will quit with an error (which happens almost all the way towards the end of the installation, so every time you will have wasted plenty of time before this happens). Additionally, if you try to power up the Subscriber after this error occurs, you will get a message that the installation did not succeed, and that you need to start over. Thank you Cisco!
Now, this is what you need to do to avoid this:
1. Your Publisher must meet one of the two conditions:
a. If your Publisher is configured to synchronize its clock via NTP with an NTP server, the clock must be successfully synchronized. If the Publisher's clock was successfully synchronized with the NTP server at one point, but the Publisher is no longer getting its clock from the NTP server at the time when you are trying to add a Subsequent node to the cluster, the Subscriber's installation will error out. To make sure that your Publisher is getting its clock from the NTP server, use the following CLI command: utils ntp status The output of this command will clearly say if the Publisher is synchronized to NTP server and the stratum.
b. If you do not have an active NTP server on the network - you are on an isolated network in the lab or this is a VMWare environment, then do not set your Publisher to synchronize to an NTP server. Instead, set it for its internal clock. You can do this by logging in to Cisco Unified Operating System Administration and navigating to Settings -> NTP Servers. Here, you will have to delete all NTP servers and then you can navigate to Settings -> Time and set the internal clock to the current time.
If you make sure that either of the aforementioned conditions - (a) or (b) - is met, you will have no problems adding a Subsequent node to the cluster, that is when working with physical hardware. However, if you are running one or both servers - Publisher and Subscriber - in VMWare, there is something else you must do. By default, VMWare configures a virtual machine to synchronize its clock with the clock of the hardware server on which the hypervisor is running. This is true for VMWare Fusion and VMWare ESXi. I am not sure about VMWare Workstation and VMWare Server, but I could bet some serious money that it is the case with those two products as well. The strange thing is that whereas in VMWare Fusion, the VM's clock is always configured to synchronize with the Mac on which it is running, in VMWare ESXi, the clock synchronization with the physical server is a hit or miss. I cannot figure out when ESXi decides to enable this feature and when to disable it. So, to be on the safe side, open the .vmx file for your VM and make sure that the following line is contained anywhere in that file: tools.syncTime = "false" alternatively, the syntax could be: tools.syncTime = "FALSE" or perhaps even tools.syncTime = "0" I have seen all three versions with the lower case in quotation marks used by ESXi, and the upper case used by Fusion. I believe that all VMWare versions understand any variation in the syntax of this command, though. If your .vmx file has the following command: tools.syncTime = "true" or tools.syncTime = "TRUE" or even tools.syncTime = "1", you will have to modify it. If your .vmx file does not contain this command at all, you will have to add it like this: tools.syncTime = "false" or use any variation of the syntax shown above.
Once you have added this command to your .vmx file, save the file and place it back where it belongs - in your VM's folder. You must do this on both servers - the Publisher and the Subscriber. On the Publisher, you will have to power down the VM, make the change in the .vmx file, and then power up the VM again - there is no need to reinstall the Publisher. On the Subscriber, this MUST be done after you have created the VM and BEFORE you start the Configuration Wizard on this Subscriber. If you have installed the Subscriber on the VM but skipped the Configuration Wizard, you can power down the Subscriber, make this change in its .vmx file, save the .vmx file, power up the Subscriber, and then run the Configuraiton Wizard. You should have no problems adding the Subscriber to the cluster at this point.
By the way, to follow up on my post of last night, I was able to add my Subscriber to the cluster with both the Publisher and the Subscriber running in VMWare ESXi 4.0U1. I would still like to know why I am getting that error every time I try to add a Subscriber, but it seems that when I retry the same step after I get the error (without having to restart the installation), the installation succeeds (sometimes).
