4.8 Administering the Time in Sun Cluster Configurations

We recommend that you use Network Time Protocol (NTP) to maintain time synchronization between cluster nodes if NTP comes with your Solaris operating environment.

An administrator cannot adjust the time of the nodes in a Sun Cluster configuration. Never attempt to perform a time change using the date(1), rdate(1M), or xntpdate(1M) commands.

In the Sun Cluster environment, the cluster nodes can run as NTP clients. You must have an NTP server set up and configured outside the cluster to use NTP; the cluster nodes cannot be configured to be NTP servers. Refer to the xntpd(1M) man page for information about NTP clients and servers.

If you are running cluster nodes as NTP clients, make sure that there are no crontab(1) entries that call ntpdate(1M). It is safer to run xntpd(1M) on the clients because that keeps the clocks in sync without making large jumps forward or backward.