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
High Availability Modes
High Availability has several operation modes, which can be selected on Device > High Availability > Settings.
Choosing the right High Availability Operation mode depends on understanding the network in question, its purpose and operational needs. In planning, the administrator should understand:
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Operational requirements for up time
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Repercussions of failure
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Calculated risk to operations
Each operation mode satisfies a different scenario and without knowing the goals of High Availability, administrators risk building an unsatisfactory solution. Understanding the operational mode and how they map to requirements is fundamental. This Active/Standby mode may be further defined as to whether they are stateless or stateful to a secondary device.
Operational modes are:
- None—Selecting None activates a standard high availability configuration and hardware failover functionality, with the option of enabling Stateful HA.
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Active/Standby Stateless—Active/Standby mode provides basic high availability with the configuration of two identical firewalls as a High Availability Pair. The Active unit handles all traffic, while the Standby unit shares its configuration settings and can take over at any time to provide continuous network connectivity if the Active unit stops working. By default, Active/Standby mode is stateless, meaning that network connections and VPN tunnels must be re-established after a failover.
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Active/Standby Stateful—Stateful Synchronization can be licensed and enabled with Active/Standby mode. In this Stateful HA mode, the dynamic state is continuously synchronized between the Active and Standby units.
Network connections and VPN tunnel information are continuously synchronized between the two units so that the Secondary can seamlessly assume all network responsibilities if the Primary firewall fails.
When the Active unit encounters a fault condition, stateful failover occurs as the Standby firewall takes over the Active role with no interruptions to the existing network connections.
Not all information is synchronized in a stateful configuration.
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