What are the Celerra time service recommendations in a CIFS environment

Thank you Dynamox, that is the answer I was hoping for.

Keep in mind the Control Station updates the back-end CLARiiON with its date/time.  It is therefore redundant to enable NTP updates also in the Navisphere/Unisphere domain.  Actually, internally there have been discussions amongst the Celerra and CLARiiON SME's that it is best practice not to configure it on the back-end CLARiiON to update from a timeserver and instead just configure the Control Station to sync (then it will update the CLARiiON SP's with its date/time).

As for the datamovers, NTP is configured separately and not part of this shared communication.  In a CIFS environment, the datamovers (with a Domain Joined CIFS Server) need to be within 5 minutes of the Domain Controller to which it is joined (due to Kerberos).  Also, just to mention it, if replicating between two Celerra's the Control Stations need to be within 10 minutes of each other.

See knowledge base article:

emc178607: "How to configure the Control Station to use a NTP Server"

If Yes ..times on Clariion SPs have nothing to do with times on Celerra datamovers.

Hmm, are you sure? Maybe not the time of the datamover, but the time of the Controlstation?

Since Unisphere and the clariion domain concept, certificates ... I am not sure if this is totaly independent.

In the newer flare codes it is possible to configure NTP for the SPs.

For analyzing error logs, logfiles, eventlogs from different systems synchronized timestamps is a "nice to have"

i just checked my ns20 and ns80 ..time on SPs is completely off from time on CS and Datamovers. I guess it's different on Unisphere or i've been running on broken config for 3 years ?