Microsoft operating systems and server applications are becoming increasingly dependent on proper time synchronization. A skewed system clock can affect your ability to log on, can cause problems with mail flow in Exchange, and be the source of a great many difficult-to-locate problems. To compound matters, the default method of handling time synchronization within a Windows network isn’t exactly reliable or even predictable. If a Hyper-V host’s clock becomes out of sync, it usually affects all of its virtual machines, sometimes catastrophically. Fortunately, it doesn’t take much work to get everything in sync.

Pick a Computer to Server as the Authoritative Internal Time Source

The first thing you want to do is decide what machine you want to serve as the authority of time within your domain. In most cases, I choose the domain controller that holds the PDC emulator role. According to Microsoft’s documentation, that’s supposed to be the highest authority on the matter anyway, although it doesn’t seem to work out that way in practice. The machine that you choose will be regularly consulting Internet sources, so if you’re in a high-security facility, you might consider delegating this role to a different computer. You could have multiple machines serving as authoritative time sources, but more than one per site generally is unnecessary. You could also have one machine pull external time and have your PDC emulator use that as its source while still serving as the authoritative server for the rest of the computers in your domain.