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by xenophonf 4119 days ago
> He could start using VMs like the rest of the world

High-accuracy/high-precision NTP servers are extraordinarily timing-sensitive, never mind the fact that they must be connected to some kind of external time standard. None of the currently available hypervisors support the kind of precision required by a stratum-1 NTP server. Even low-precision applications---such as Active Directory, which can handle clock skew of up to 5 minutes by default---recommend against running time servers in virtual machines.

To get an idea of the engineering tolerances involved, please refer to "Clock Quality" in the NTP FAQ:

http://www.ntp.org/ntpfaq/NTP-s-sw-clocks-quality.htm