F5CABR: F5 Certified Administrator, BIG-IP Recertification

BIG-IP device trust between members of a device group depends on certificate-based mutual authentication, which requires the system clocks on all devices to stay closely synchronized (F5 recommends configuring NTP identically on every device in the group). When the 'Time Delta to Local Device' value reported by 'show cm device' is non-zero and significant, it indicates a clock skew between the local device and the peer, which breaks the certificate/trust validation process and blocks config sync. HA state (active/standby) and Next Active Load Factor values are used only to determine failover behavior and which device becomes active — they do not affect or block configuration synchronization.