Cannot update the dynamic configuration policy error vCenter Appliance

Working in my lab today, I was having some issues with deploying virtual machines within vCloud Director.

I remember a while ago that Chris Colotti had written an article about the importance of NTP with vCloud Director.  I thought I had better syncronize the vCNSM (formally vShield Manager), vCenter Appliance, and vCloud Director.

Setting NTP on a vCD cell and vCNS Manager is a very simple task, but how do you do it on the vCenter Appliance?  There is no option through the configuration UI.  A quick google showed me this page within the vSphere 5.1 documentation center.

Procedure

Log into the vCenter Server Appliance as root.
From a command line, enter the following commands to configure and start an NTP client.

yast2 ntp-client add server=your_chosen_time_server
yast2 ntp-client enable

Enter the following command to request immediate synchronization with the time server.

sntp -P no -r your_chosen_time_server

However following this guide, I received the error:

Error:
Cannot update the dynamic configuration policy.

Again I hit google, and found this bugzilla page by Novell. It states this issue is fixed, but doesnt show you how to fix the problem.

So what do I do know? Well the vCenter Appliance is based on SuSE linux, so I thought I would try simply configuring NTP manually. These are the steps I took to configure NTP.

Edit the file /etc/ntp.conf and add the following line
server pool.ntp.org dynamic

You then need to initialize NTP by issuing the command rcntp start

I don’t know if this is a random issue, or whether it is a known bug. There appeared to be limited information on the internet for it.

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4 Responses to Cannot update the dynamic configuration policy error vCenter Appliance

  1. Steve Flanders February 18, 2013 at 6:02 am #

    Great tip! One additional thing you may have noticed on the VCSA is that NTP is not configured to start on boot:

    ~ # chkconfig –list ntp
    ntp 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:off 6:off

    This is easy to fix with:

    ~ # chkconfig ntp on
    insserv: Service network is missed in the runlevels 4 to use service postgresql
    insserv: Service syslog is missed in the runlevels 4 to use service postgresql
    ~ # chkconfig –list ntp
    ntp 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:off 5:on 6:off

    One other note is that if you look at other services they default to 2, 3, and 5:

    ~ # chkconfig –list syslog
    syslog 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:off 5:on 6:off

    So you could decide to mimic this on NTP:

    ~ # chkconfig –level 235 ntp
    ntp on
    ~ # chkconfig –list ntp
    ntp 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:off 5:on 6:off

    • mikey03062 June 26, 2013 at 8:07 pm #

      Steve,

      Notice in your “check” that ntp is only “on” for 35, why isn’t it on for 2 like syslog?

      David – if you edit the ntp.conf, and execute the yast commands, it complains it will overwrite the ntp.conf, losing your changes, so bear caution not to subsequently use yast for any further system changes.

      • Steve Flanders June 27, 2013 at 3:55 am #

        Mikey – appears to be a copy past thing as the last command would have enabled 2. I do not believe enabling it for init 2 does you any good though as the VCSA runs on SuSE and init 2 on SuSE does not include networking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runlevel)

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  1. Sync up vCenter Server with NTP: Bug and Workaround | DoubleCloud.org - August 7, 2013

    […] a bit Web searching, I got this blog whose author had done good research and found it’s a bug in SUSE (vCenter appliance is based […]

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