so you can probably guess from the title that we were having problems with some msi’s not being deployed correctly to “random” virtual servers. you can also probably guess by the quotes around random that it wasn’t random at all, and there was a very good reason. here are the details.

we use a msi creator called advanced installer (www.advancedinstaller.com) to create and deploy all of our applications to client workstations and servers.

what we noticed was that after trying to install a msi to a cluster of terminal servers, the msi was only getting installed correctly on a handful a machines. now, i say “machines”, but the interesting wrinkle was that all these machines are actually virtual, and they are spread across a vmware esx cluster.

when we would log onto the windows host to look at the logs and why the msi didn’t get installed, here is what we found:

so even though the clock on the OS was right (and we triple checked this), at logon when policies and gpo’s were being applied, the clock was wrong. in this picture, this error actually happend about 3 minutes before the picture was taken, even though it shows a time difference of almost 8 hours.

the one thing we uncovered was that every server that got the gpo and msi’s installed correctly were all located on one esx host. when we looked at the time settings in esx, we found that on the servers having problems, the esx hosts ntp service was stopped, or hadn’t been configured at all.

from there, it was pretty easy. we just went to every esx/esxi host and configured and enabled the ntp server, and viola, the gpo’s and msi’s installed without a hitch!