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Status Not under consideration
Created by Guest
Created on Mar 29, 2023

CPS support for two NTP-appliances in master/slave setup

CPS support for two NTP-appliances in master/slave setup
Today CPS uses the option to configure multiple NTP-servers (four or more) which debate on the time.
The CPS state is determined from the default Redhat configuration on the PSM.

We need CPS support for using two NTP-appliances in master/slave setup.
The CPS systems run some of the most business critical applications which also rely on external authentication services from other organizations (in other datacenters) which is time sensitive (so the time on VMs on CPS needs to match the time known to this external authentication service). 
For this we have two NTP-appliances, one in each datacenter, which act as NTP stratum 1 server which is directly connected to an external reference timesource (GPS/Atom clock) as stratum 0.
To make sure the VM's on CPS have the correct time we need CPS support to configure the two NTP-appliances as two NTP-servers in CPS in master/slave setup. The 'local' NTP-appliance in the same datacenter as master and the NTP-appliance in the other datacenter as slave. The slave is for redundancy in the case the master NTP (appliance) server is not reachable or is not available, the other NTP (appliance) server is acting as a timesource for the CPS systems.

Red Hat supports the NTP master/slave setup as well referred to as 'truechimer' as documented here: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/58025
In our datacenter we have already integrated other parts of our infrastructure (i.e. VMware) with these two NTP (appliance) servers using a master/slave setup. 
We need CPS to support the NTP master/slave setup as well.

Idea priority High