Failover
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Failover

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Failover

When a failure occurs on one firewall and the peer takes over the task of securing traffic, the event is called a failover. A failover is triggered, for example, when a monitored metric on a firewall in the HA pair fails. The metrics that are monitored for detecting a firewall failure are:
  • Heartbeat Polling and Hello messages
    The firewalls use hello message and heartbeats to verify that the peer firewall is responsive and operational. Hello messages are sent from one peer to the other at the configured Hello Interval to verify the state of the firewall. The heartbeat is an ICMP ping to the HA peer over the control link, and the peer responds to the ping to establish that the firewalls are connected and responsive. By default, the interval for the heartbeat is 1000 milliseconds. A ping is sent every 1000 milliseconds and if there are three consecutive heartbeat losses, a failovers occurs. For details on the HA timers that trigger a failover, see HA Timers.
  • Link Monitoring
    The physical interfaces to be monitored are grouped into a link group and their state (link up or link down) is monitored. A link group can contain one or more physical interfaces. A firewall failure is triggered when any or all of the interfaces in the group fail. The default behavior is failure of any one link in the link group will cause the firewall to change the HA state to non-functional (or to tentative state in active/active mode) to indicate a failure of a monitored object.
  • Path Monitoring
    Monitors the full path through the network to mission-critical IP addresses. ICMP pings are used to verify reachability of the IP address. The default interval for pings is 200ms. An IP address is considered unreachable when 10 consecutive pings (the default value) fail, and a firewall failure is triggered when any or all of the IP addresses monitored become unreachable. The default behavior is any one of the IP addresses becoming unreachable will cause the firewall to change the HA state to non-functional (or to tentative state in active/active mode) to indicate a failure of a monitored object.
In addition to the failover triggers listed above, a failover also occurs when the administrator suspends the firewall or when preemption occurs.
On PA-3200 Series, PA-5200 Series, and PA-7000 Series firewalls, a failover can occur when an internal health check fails. This health check is not configurable and is enabled to monitor the critical components, such as the FPGA and CPUs. Additionally, general health checks occur on any platform, causing failover.

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