Configuring NTP for the SMC Appliance and Secure SD-WAN Engines

You can use external NTP servers to provide time synchronization for the SMC Appliance and Secure SD-WAN Engines.

By default, the SMC Appliance uses the public Forcepoint NTP servers. The Management Server and default Log Server synchronize with the SMC Appliance time.

By default, Secure SD-WAN Engines get time setting commands from the Management Server. If an Secure SD-WAN Engine is configured to use NTP and it can successfully get the time from an external NTP server, the Secure SD-WAN Engine ignores time setting commands from the Management Server.

You must have an SMC Appliance to configure NTP for SMC servers in the Management Client.

Note: You cannot configure NTP in the Management Client for SMC installations on third-party hardware or virtualization platforms. On third-party hardware or virtualization platforms, the SMC gets the time from the operating system. When you use third-party hardware or virtualization platforms, you must configure NTP at the operating system level on the third-party hardware or virtualization platform. For more information, see Knowledge Base article 9680.