The vCommander ecosystem includes many systems with which vCommander® integrates or interacts. Some of these systems, particularly Active Directory and vCenter, can exhibit unwanted behavior when the time is not synchronized with your vCommander application server. When the time is not synchronized across systems, and the difference (clock skew) between the time for vCommander and your directory service is too great, you will not be able to login with a directory account, but will still be able to access vCommander using a local account such as the default superuser.


When this is the case, you will see messages similar to the following in the vcommander.log file:


In vCommander, you can also check the status of the directory services integration:
  1. Choose System Configuration under the Configuration menu.
  2. Switch to the Authentication tab.
  3. If a caution sign appears beside an integrated directory service, this indicates issues with the integration, such as time synchronization.

  4. Click Edit and immediately Save the configuration without making any changes. You will receive an error if time synchronization is preventing success:

To resolve, you must make sure that the vCommander application server and the out-of-synch systems are all using the same time server. It’s a good idea to use an external time source, for example Google’s:

time1.google.com
time2.google.com
time3.google.com
time4.google.com


However, the best option is to speak with your network admin to  confirm whether or not there is a preferred server on the network.  Either way, all servers should be configured to use the same time.