Managing the system time (cluster administrators only)

Problems can occur when the storage system clock is inaccurate. You can manually set the time zone, date, and time on a node to reflect the location of your preference. However, it is best to keep your system time synchronized automatically by using the Network Time Protocol (NTP).

Data ONTAP 8.0 and 8.0.1 use NTP v4 by default. To address situations where certain time servers support only NTP v3, starting with Data ONTAP 8.0.2, the NTP version to be used for communicating with a newly configured NTP server defaults to v3 instead of v4. The NTP Daemon continues to use the highest supported version (v4 in this case) to communicate with the time servers that were configured prior to Data ONTAP 8.0.2.

You can manage the system time with NTP in the following ways:

•	Enabling or disabling the use of NTP for the cluster

By default, NTP is disabled.

•	Displaying whether NTP is currently enabled for the cluster

•	Associating a node with an NTP server

•	Specifying the preferred NTP server and version for a node

•	Displaying information about NTP servers that are associated with a node or the cluster

•	Dissociating a node from an NTP server

You use the system services ntp config and system services ntp server commands to manage the NTP service. For more information, see the man pages. You can get a list of public NTP time servers from the NTP Public Services page.

If you do not use NTP, you can manually manage the system time in the following ways:

•	Setting or modifying the time zone, date, and time on a node

•	Displaying the current time zone, date, and time settings of a node or the cluster

You use the system node date commands to manage the system time manually. For more information, see the man pages.

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Setting the time zone for a cluster

You can use the Edit DateTime dialog box to manually set the date, time, and time zone for your cluster.