Time Synchronization

If you experience issues logging in to guest systems that belong to Active Directory, or if you are unable to add an Active Directory user to a local group, the explanation is typically simple: The system times are not synchronized.

To solve this problem, you can access the virtual machine settings and disable time synchronization between the host and the guest system in the Integration services section (Figure 5). Then, log in to the guest system with a local user account and restart the Windows timekeeping service.

Figure 5: Disabling time synchronization can solve login issues.

This action will prompt the guest system to synchronize its local time with the primary domain controller. Now you should be able to log in to the domain or add domain accounts to local groups on the guest.

Conclusions

Microsoft's Hyper-V technology is a free virtualization solution that offers good performance, excellent scalability, and failover for enterprise-level applications. Thanks to SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2, the hypervisor now benefits from new functions for dynamic memory management on VMs and the ability to swap graphics performance out to the host system, which is particularly interesting for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.