We recently installed Governance Edition on our Centera clusters, and needed to get time in sync between the clusters. I have NFI why ntp wasn’t configured previously, but here’re the steps. Special thanks to Mat for bothering to take screenshots of everything while it was happening. I know it’s a long article, and I don’t want to give too much away, but everyone gets the right time in the end.
Config# show cluster time Cluster: Mon Aug 12 23:49:12 2013 UTC (External NTP disabled) Config# set ntp configuration External NTP Enabled? (yes, no) [no]: yes Network association (access, management) [access]: access IP address of NTP server: 1.1.1.1 Issue the command? (yes, no) [no]: yes Command failed: External NTP is not enabled. The cluster is more than 30s off with the NTP server. Please contact EMC Customer Support for assistance in enabling external NTP. Config# set cluster time You cannot set the cluster time on a cluster is not in Basic mode. Please contact EMC Customer Support.
At this point you’ll need to contact EMC Support, as you won’t be able to run the commands yourself. You can either opt to drift the time in (this is very slow) or you can have an outage on the cluster and force the time to be set (we opted to drift the time in).
Config# set cluster time Current cluster time is: 13 Aug 2013 02:32:53 UTC New UTC time [DD-MMM-YYYY HH:MM:SS or IP address of NTP server]: 1.1.1.1 New cluster time will be set to 13 Aug 2013 02:41:12 UTC Stop cluster services to change time? (yes, no) [no]: no Cluster time will be adjusted forward with approximately 8 minutes 19 seconds. The adjustment will take approximately 11 days 14 hours 28 minutes to complete. Issue the command? (yes, no) [no]: yes Cluster started to adjust cluster time with 8 minutes 19 seconds.
You can check the progress of the time sync by using the “show cluster time” command, it will give you an approximate amount of time remaining till the adjustment process has completed
Config# show cluster time Warning: Cluster time adjustment is in progress. 8 minutes 18 seconds left to adjust forward Cluster: Tue Aug 13 02:44:06 2013 UTC (External NTP disabled) Config# show cluster time Warning: Cluster time adjustment is in progress. 1 minute 17 seconds left to adjust forward Cluster: Thu Aug 22 21:10:50 2013 UTC (External NTP disabled) Config# show cluster time Cluster: Sun Aug 25 22:47:58 2013 UTC (External NTP disabled)
Once the time has been adjusted you can then set up NTP
Config# set ntp configuration External NTP Enabled? (yes, no) [no]: yes Network association (access, management) [access]: access IP address of NTP server: 1.1.1.1 Issue the command? (yes, no) [no]: yes External NTP is successfully enabled.
If you have more than one NTP server you can add it to the list of server to sync against
Config# set ntp addserver IP address of NTP server: 2.2.2.2 Issue the command? (yes, no) [no]: yes The specified NTP server is successfully added.
Show the current NTP configuration and status
Config# show ntp configuration Cluster NTP configuration: External NTP is enabled Network association: access NTP servers: # IP --------------- 1 1.1.1.1 2 2.2.2.2 --------------- Config# show ntp status all Node name: centera1 Node roles: access,replication,management,storage,blc # IP Status Offset ----------------------------------- 1 1.1.1.1 good 0s 2 2.2.2.2 good 0s ----------------------------------- Node name: centera2 Node roles: access,replication,management,storage,blc # IP Status Offset ----------------------------------- 1 1.1.1.1 good 0s 2 2.2.2.2 good 0s -----------------------------------
Now when you issue the “show cluster time” command it states that it is synced via NTP.
Config# show cluster time Cluster: Mon Aug 26 05:00:22 2013 UTC (Synchronized with external NTP)