Associating an Appliance at First Registration on MySonicWall for High Availability

You can associate two SonicWall security appliances as HA Primary and HA Secondary on mysonicwall.com. Note that the Backup appliance of your High Availability pair is referred to as the HA Secondary unit on mysonicwall.com. After the appliances are associated as an HA Pair, they can share licenses. 

You must purchase a single set of security services licenses for the HA Primary appliance. It is not required that the Primary and Backup appliances have the same security services enabled. The security services settings will be automatically updated as part of the initial synchronization of settings. 

To use Stateful High Availability, you must purchase a Stateful High Availability Upgrade license for the Primary unit. Stateful High Availability is a licensed service that must be activated for the Primary appliance on mysonicwall.com. The license is shared with the Backup unit.

License synchronization is used in a high availability deployment so that the Backup appliance can maintain the same level of network protection provided before the failover. To enable high availability, you can use the SonicOS management interface to configure your two appliances as a High Availability pair in Active/Idle mode.

Mysonicwall.com provides several methods of associating the two appliances. You can start by registering a new appliance, and then choosing an already-registered unit to associate it with. Or, you can associate two units that are both already registered. Or, you can start the process by selecting a registered unit and adding a new appliance with which to associate it.  

NOTE: After registering new SonicWall appliances on mysonicwall.com, you must also register the Backup appliance from the SonicOS management interface while logged into its
individual management IP address. This allows the Backup unit to synchronize with the SonicWall license server and share licenses with the associated Primary appliance.

Associating an Appliance at First Registration

To register a new SonicWall security appliance and associate it as a Backup unit to an existing Primary unit so that it can use High Availability license synchronization, perform the following steps: 

1. Login to mysonicwall.com.
2. On the main page, in the left pane, in the text box under Quick Register, type the appliance serial number and then press Enter or click the arrow button.
3. On the My Products page, under Add New Product, type the friendly name for the appliance and the authentication code into the appropriate text boxes, and then click Register.
4. On the Product Survey page, optionally fill in the requested information and then click Continue.
5. On the Create Association Page, click the radio button for the SonicWall appliance that you want to act as the parent, or Primary, unit in the High Availability pair. You can skip this step if you want your new appliance to be a Primary unit itself. The screen displays only units that are not already Backup units for other appliances. Do one of the following:
   1. To make this appliance a Primary unit, click Continue without clicking a radio button.
   2. If one appliance is available as the parent product (Primary unit), click the radio button to select it, and then click Continue.
   3. If multiple appliances are available for the parent product, click the radio button for the one you want, and then click Continue.
6. If you clicked Continue without selecting a choice for HA Primary in the preceding step, click the radio button under Child Product Type to select a choice for HA Secondary (Backup unit), and then click Continue. Your new appliance will be the HA Primary unit for the device that you select.
7. On the next screen, you can verify that your product registered successfully and, at the bottom under Parent Product, verify the correct appliance and serial number for the parent (or child, if you chose that option).

You can click the Serial Number link for the parent product to display the Service Management - Associated Products page and verify that the newly registered appliance is listed as a child product associated with this parent.

You can click HA Secondary to display the My Product - Associated Products page for the child/secondary/Backup, unit. Note that you can also change the associated product (parent) for this child on this page.

 For configuring High Advailability in SonicOS Enhanced please see How to Configuring High Availability (HA) in SonicOS Enhanced?