Hot off the press from training here with in Issaquah with Mark Stanfill and the SBS MVPs. If you are installing Essential Business Server (EBS) 2008 you are going to need to set the BIOS time zone on the Host.
“The EBS setup, like all Windows Server 2008 installations, does not expose time zone settings until after OOBE setup. This means that the local time on all three servers will be PST during setup. Internally, all setup-dependent operations use UTC, so, even if there is a discrepancy between two machines’ time zone settings, internally their clocks will be in synch. This is critical for operations such as obtaining Kerberos tickets, replication, logging, etc.
Because of the complexity of the setup timings, local time on the EBS servers should never be adjusted until all three servers complete their installation. Doing so may lead to an unhandled exception, whose only recourse is to start that server’s installation over again.
Virtualized servers must set their local time to PST for the duration of the install. Not doing so will skew the guest machine’s clock during reboots, because the guest OS’s BIOS setting is not aware of time zone changes. This will result in all Kerberos tickets expiring or being flagged as not yet valid, depending on the time zone of the host.”
Thanks Mark for allowing us to get this out to the community!
Steve