Q. Why should I disable time synchronization services for a PDC Flexible Single-Master Operation (FSMO) virtual machine (VM)?

A. Virtualization is becoming more widespread and virtual environments offer a large number of services to improve the consistency and performance of the infrastructure. There are, however, certain instances where you should disable some services.

The PDC FSMO acts as the time source for the entire domain and should sync its time from an external Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) time source. You don't want the virtual server hosting the PDC FSMO to use its own local time to overwrite the time that PDC FSMO gets from the external time source, so you need to disable any time synchronization services in the virtual environment.

In Hyper-V you do this via settings for the VM. Select Integration Services from the Management section. Uncheck the "Time synchronization" option and click OK.

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