Virtual Grandmaster Clock — software-defined timing reference for cloud and virtualised networks.
Any Linux
Bare metal / VM / container
Software
Pure — no custom silicon
G.8275.1
Full profile support
Scale-out
Active-active replicas
Physical grandmasters are great — until you’re running in the cloud, in a vRAN environment, or at a site where there’s no rack to mount one. VGMC is the Virtual Grandmaster Clock: a software grandmaster that runs on any Linux host, takes network-reachable GNSS or upstream PTP as its reference, and serves PTP downstream as if it were a hardware appliance. Deploy it where there’s no rack space, no budget for a physical box, or where adding “one more piece of hardware” isn’t an option.
What it does
Bare metal, VM, container, edge device — if it runs Linux, it can run VGMC. No PCIe card, no proprietary NIC, no vendor hardware dependency.
Uses any combination of upstream PTP, network-distributed GNSS, or a White Rabbit link as its reference. Cascade VGMCs for layered distribution.
G.8275.1, G.8275.2, G.8265.1, SMPTE ST 2059-2, Default profiles — the same standards you’d get from a hardware grandmaster.
Run multiple VGMCs in active-active configuration for redundancy. Pairs with PTP² Mesh for full topology resilience without any hardware.
A VGMC instance is a first-class citizen in the Timebeat App — full metrics, alerting and historical replay like any other clock.
Hardware timestamping on modern NICs delivers sub-microsecond PTP performance from commodity hardware, for the PTP profiles where that precision is enough.
How it works
Step 1
VM, container or bare metal — any distribution with a recent kernel. VGMC installs as a single binary plus a config file.
Step 2
Upstream PTP, network GNSS, White Rabbit — VGMC uses whatever references are reachable, with configurable fall-through priority.
Step 3
VGMC exposes a full PTP grandmaster interface on the host’s NIC, visible to every downstream slave in the domain.
Where it lives
01
A software grandmaster at every DU host — no dedicated hardware per site, but still G.8275.1 compliant fronthaul sync.
02
Run timing in AWS, Azure, GCP, or any managed Kubernetes cluster. No physical grandmaster, no colo contract.
03
Where the economics don’t justify a hardware appliance, VGMC gives you a credible timing reference for the price of a compute slot.
04
Spin up a new grandmaster in minutes without shipping hardware. Tear it down just as fast. Infrastructure-as-code timing.
Hardware pairs
The capabilities of VGMC pair naturally with these products. Deploy together for the fullest experience.
Standards & compatibility
Also in the platform
Book a demo
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Further reading
Pillar guide
What a grandmaster actually does, how to choose one, and the three things that separate a grandmaster you can trust from one that quietly drifts.
Cluster
Choosing the right oscillator class — the drift numbers that matter and the deployment scenarios where each is correct.
Interactive tool
Model the regulatory and operational cost of a GNSS disruption for your industry and oscillator class.
Library
Guides, blogs and case studies for teams evaluating or deploying this solution.
A virtual grandmaster clock is an IP endpoint that looks like a single PTP grandmaster to downstream clients but is backed by multiple physical Timebeat Agents — redundancy, capacity and failover at the topology level, with a single client-facing configuration.
How PTP² Mesh turns a fleet of Timebeat Agents into a self-discovering, self-healing time distribution network. mDNS and DHT peer discovery, seat-based capacity, active-active operation and millisecond failover — for when you need redundancy without the rigidity of classical BMCA hierarchies.
What a PTP grandmaster clock actually does, how to choose one, and what separates a grandmaster you can trust from one that quietly drifts. Written by TimeBeat's engineering team for network architects deploying IEEE 1588 in production.
A practical, vendor-neutral checklist for selecting a PTP grandmaster clock — what to specify, what to ignore, and the questions that separate a deployment that works from one that quietly fails.
Choosing the right PTP profile is the difference between a deployment that works on day one and one that needs three weeks of debugging. A practical guide to G.8275.1, G.8275.2, ST 2110 and the IEEE 1588 default profile — what each is for, what defaults matter, and how to mix them.
For most of computing, millisecond-class clock synchronisation is fine. For a growing list of use cases — finance, broadcast, 5G, AI, distributed databases — it isn't. A field guide to recognising when your application has crossed the line and millisecond-grade time has become a liability.
