One of the most important values needed when monitoring, tracking, or managing any critical application is the time and date of the event. When deploying a workload on any public cloud, Date and Time is the first adjustment task of any cloud management team.
Last month, Veeam Software released a great new Backup product for Azure Workloads (you can read more about it using the following link). If you were one of the lucky administrators who had the opportunity to deploy the new product, maybe you need to change the date and time of the appliance to a different time zone.
To Change the appliance time zone, date and time you are going to need the following steps in this blog:
Let’s get started – connect to the VBA Appliance:
By default, and after the deployment, you will notice that the SSH port is already open. If you have reconfigured your deployment to close the SSH port, re-enable it and connect to the VBA Appliance.
After you have connected, you can confirm the current local date and time using the following command: ~$ date
Retrieving the list of available Time-Zones
Before you set up your local time, you must figure out how your time zone is presented on the operating system. You do this by running the following command: ~$ timedatectl list-timezones
That previous command will return a very long list. To focus the return list back on to Australia, for example, I used the following Command: ~$ timedatectl list-timezones | grep Australia
Including the | grep Australia reduced the list of options considerably. From the options, I will select my location, Australia/Sydney, and run my date/time set command accordingly.
Setting up the Appliance local time zone
Those steps above have got us to the point where we can now set the time zone. Run this command: ~$ sudo timedatectl set-timezone Australia/Sydney
To make sure the time of my Appliance remains correct, I will synchronise the time with an NTP server: ~$ sudo timedatectl set-ntp on sudo
After that been done, I rebooted the appliance using the reboot command: ~$ sudo reboot
After my appliance came back up and reconnected, you can see that it is now all set to my local time zone:
Summary
Setting your appliance to your local time zone is a very important task. Some of those reasons I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post were monitoring, tracking, or managing, and many more. You can now see that setting your timezone on your VBA appliance is a very easy three-step process.
We used these SSH commands: SSH <Appliance IP>, timedatectl list-timezones | grep Australia , sudo timedatectl, and set-ntp on.
