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Forum Discussion

Netmart's avatar
Netmart
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
May 13, 2025

Load balancing NTP Servers

Hello,  We want to put two NTP servers behind a F5 [GTM]. The applications only know the DNS name [VIP], while the F5 is forwarding NTP requests to only NTP Server A. Desired Failover Conditions li...
security
Netmart's avatar
Netmart
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
May 27, 2025

Thank you.

The link you suggested seems to be not available anymore, but I read about the priority option as well. This way, ntp requests are forwarded to one server. However, the question remains how granular can the health check be done [beyond ICMP checks] for the F5 to determine when to forward NTP requests to the secondary ntp server, in case the primary is failing.

Hamish's avatar
Hamish
Icon for Cirrocumulus rankCirrocumulus
May 28, 2025

You can make it as granular as you like with custom health monitors. The monitors can even feed back load stats to enable you to balance some traffic to one when the other is under heavy load.