How can I setup an NTP Cluster for the Network Clients?



A Cluster Mode is a specific method of redundancy where a few NTP servers are joined together in a cluster. They are continuously exchanging their status information among themselves and one of them is selected to be a current master accordingly. The rest are waiting in a passive state for backup if the current master fails or loses its sync signal. The current master replies to requests from NTP clients by a common cluster IP. This stays the same even if the master gets replaced by another server from the cluster (see a possible setup in Figure 1). The cluster mode of operation is especially useful then, when NTP clients allow only one input IP for synchronization.

To reach an optimized cluster performance it is advised to combine at least three servers in a cluster. In this case one avoids confusion with two servers where one never knows which of them is supplying more accurate time. Besides, three or more servers allow detection of a potential falseticker.

For more information about cluster configuration, please visit Meinberg Blog at:
How to setup NTP Cluster with LANTIME Network Time Server

Figure 1: An example of a cluster setup with stratum 1 NTP servers with different receivers. NTP clients query time by one cluster IP, independent which of the servers is a current master.

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