Verifying failover functionality through controlled testing ensures that your HA deployment will perform as expected during actual failure scenarios. By intentionally triggering failover events and monitoring the transition process, you can validate that session synchronization, IP address failover, and traffic handling occur seamlessly, confirming that your high availability configuration will provide the expected redundancy and business continuity when real failures occur.

Additionally, suspending High Availability temporarily disables the HA functionality on a firewall, effectively taking it out of the HA pair while allowing you to perform maintenance, troubleshooting, or testing activities without triggering an unintended failover. When you suspend HA on the active firewall, it remains active but stops sending heartbeat messages and ceases synchronization with its peer, while suspending HA on the passive firewall prevents it from becoming active even if the current active firewall fails. This administrative control is essential for planned maintenance windows, configuration testing, or when you need to isolate one firewall to diagnose issues without affecting the HA relationship permanently.