This issue appear to be banal, but actually consumed precious (lost) time of my day deploying a vCenter Server Appliance on an external Platform Service controller, version 6.5.
At the “Install – Stage 2: Set Up vCenter Server Appliance”, you are asked for Single Sign-On infos of the PSC appliance. Clicking next, you may encounter the following message :
The time on this VMware vCenter Server Appliance is out of synchronization with the external Platform Services Controller with which you are trying to register by <seconds> seconds.
First thoughts, check for timezone and clock on both machines, it match. Ok, maybe it is offset a few seconds and the installer is very sensitive, configuring NTP with same source, same issue.
It turned out that the installer does not like other localtime value than UTC! If you have changed it to your local time zone, please change it back to UTC.
Using the VMware vSphere Appliance Management (https://domain.tld:5480) :
Navigator > Time > Time Zone
Using the CLI :
1. Remove the current timezone symlink :
rm /etc/localtime
2. Set the new timezone :
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime
You may do a manual synchronization to time server using the following commands if necessary :
service ntpd stop ntpdate time.chu.nrc.ca service ntpdate start
(Time servers are defined in /etc/ntpd.conf as well)