NTP Enterprise Design

In the previous lessons you built a simple hierarchy: R1 learning time from a public NTP server, and SW1 learning time from R1.
In a big enterprise network, you often set up several NTP servers. This ensures redundancy and reliability.

Many NTP Servers for Redundancy

Figure 1 – NTP Clients and Servers with many peers

In this example, the public NTP Servers from Amazon (1.amazon.pool.ntp.org and 2.amazon.pool.ntp.org) are used to synchronize the internal network.

Configuring NTP Master

The border routers (R1 and R2) are configured as NTP Masters with a stratum level of 6, using the command: ntp master 6

By default, ntp master uses stratum 8. Here, we lower it to 6 so NTP clients see the routers as more reliable sources during an outage.