Synchronizing the hypervisor and Service Processor time-of-day clocks to Time Reference Partition
You can ensure that the time-of-day clocks used by the hypervisor and Service Processor are accurate through the usage of one or more Time Reference Partitions (TRP). Whenever the time-of-day changes in the TRP, the hypervisor and the service processors time-of-day are updated to match the time that is specified by the TRP. The time of the TRP can be changed manually or can be managed by using the Network Time Protocol (NTP) support. NTP can be used to automatically ensure consistent time-of-day across multiple servers. When you designate a logical partition as a TRP, you must choose a logical partition that cannot be migrated to another server such as a Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) partition. More than one TRP can be specified per server and the longest running TRP is recognized as the TRP of the system.
The service processor uses its time-of-day clock for time stamps of various error logs and events. The service processor has a battery backed clock so if an electrical outage occurs, the server can maintain the current time-of-day. Whenever a server is powered on, the hypervisor time-of-day clock is initialized from the time-of-day clock of the service processor. The hypervisor uses its time-of-day clock whenever a new partition is created. Newly created partitions start with the time-of-day clock of the hypervisor. After a logical partition is created, the time-of-day clock of the logical partition is separate from the time-of-day clock of the hypervisor (changes to the time of the hypervisor does not affect existing partitions).
To enable TRP on a partition, complete the following steps: