On standalone Windows servers (servers not members of a domain) the time service only checks the time against an NTP server on startup as a triggered action. If the server is on hardware with a “reliable” hardware clock, this is usually not a problem as clock drift on most modern hardware is minimal, if however the hardware clock is not reliable, or the Computer is running in a virtual environment, it may take incorrect clock data from the VM host (if the host has an unreliable or “wrong” hardware clock, or it may just drift more than expected.

First of all I like to set the time service to be automatic

sc triggerinfo w32time delete

Start the time service

net start w32tm

Configure a suitable set of NTP servers, I use the pool project.

ww32tm /config /manualpeerlist:"0.uk.pool.ntp.org 1.uk.pool.ntp.org 2.uk.pool.ntp.org 3.uk.pool.ntp.org" /syncfromflags:manual /update

and force the time service to resync against the configured time servers

w32tm /resync