Problems can occur when the cluster time is inaccurate. Although ONTAP enables you to manually set the time zone, date, and time on the cluster, you must configure the Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers to synchronize the cluster time with external NTP servers.

Beginning with ONTAP 9.5, you can configure your NTP server with symmetric authentication.

You can associate a maximum of 10 external NTP servers by using the cluster time-service ntp server create command. For redundancy and quality of time service, you should associate at least three external NTP servers with the cluster.

For details about the configuration of NTP in ONTAP, see Managing the cluster time (cluster administrators only).