SonicOS 7.1 High Availability Administration Guide
- SonicOS 7.1
- About SonicOS
- High Availability
- Replacing an HA Primary Unit
- High Availability Config
- Configuration of HA Active/Standby
- Configuring Active/Standby High Availability Settings
- Configuring HA with Dynamic WAN Interfaces
- Configuring Network DHCP and Interface Settings
- Disabling the SonicOS DHCP Server
- Configuring Virtual IP Addresses
- Configuring Redundant Ports
- Fine Tuning High Availability
- Advanced Settings
- Configuring Advanced High Availability Settings
- Monitoring High Availability
- Configuring Active/Standby High Availability Monitoring
- Configuring Active/Standby High Availability Settings
- IPv6 High Availability Monitoring
- About This Document
- Azure Use Cases
- SonicWall Support
Working of Active/Standby HA
HA requires one SonicWall Security Appliance configured as the Primary SonicWall, and an identical Security Appliance configured as the Secondary SonicWall. During normal operation, the Primary SonicWall is in an Active state and the Secondary SonicWall in an Standby state. If the Primary device loses connectivity, the Secondary SonicWall transitions to Active mode and assumes the configuration and role of Primary, including the interface IP addresses of the configured interfaces.
Basic Active/Standby HA provides stateless high availability. After a failover to the Secondary Security Appliance, all the pre-existing network connections must be re-established, including the VPN tunnels that must be re-negotiated. Stateful Synchronization can be licensed and enabled separately. For more information, see About Stateful Synchronization.
The failover applies to loss of functionality or network-layer connectivity on the Active SonicWall. The failover to the Standby SonicWall occurs when critical services are affected, physical or logical link failure is detected on monitored interfaces, if, not when the Active SonicWall loses power.
There are two types of synchronization for all configuration settings:
- Incremental - If the timestamps are in sync and a change is made on the Active unit, an incremental synchronization is pushed to the Standby unit.
-
Complete - If the timestamps are out of sync and the Standby unit is available, a complete synchronization is pushed to the Standby unit. When incremental synchronization fails, a complete synchronization is automatically attempted
The complete synchronization reboots the Standby unit.
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