The Fabric Manager uses Network Time Protocol (NTP) to synchronize the date and time (and time zone, if applicable) across various components of the fabric such as Fabric Manager, platform management card, Secure Partitioning (s-Par®), partitions, and so on. NTP uses a port to pass time and timing values that are used to lock a client system’s clock in step with its time server.

For all the components within the fabric, the Fabric Management Platform (FMP) acts as the time source for all the fabric components.

Alternately, you connect the Fabric Management Platform to an external NTP time source, which can then serve as the time source for the Fabric Management Platform itself, and thus the other fabric components. For the partitions, the user has the option to configure the partition to use the Fabric Management Platform or an alternate time source as the time source for the partition.

If you have two Fabric Management Platforms and they are configured as a high availability cluster, the second Fabric Management Platform uses the first Fabric Management Platform as its time source. And partitions can be configured to access both Fabric Management Platforms through each Fabric Management Platform's static IP address, and use the Fabric Management Platforms as time sources.