Determining Which Type Of Failover To Use - Cisco FirePOWER ASA 5500 series Configuration Manual

Understanding Failover

Determining Which Type of Failover to Use

The type of failover you choose depends upon your security appliance configuration and how you plan
to use the security appliances.
If you are running the security appliance in single mode, then you can only use Active/Standby failover.
Active/Active failover is only available to security appliances running in multiple context mode.
If you are running the security appliance in multiple context mode, then you can configure either
Active/Active failover or Active/Standby failover.
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•
Table 14-3
configuration:
Table 14-3
Feature
Single Context Mode
Multiple Context Mode
Load Balancing Network Configurations
Unit Failover
Failover of Groups of Contexts
Failover of Individual Contexts
Regular and Stateful Failover
The security appliance supports two types of failover, regular and stateful. This section includes the
following topics:
•
•
Regular Failover
When a failover occurs, all active connections are dropped. Clients need to reestablish connections when
the new active unit takes over.
Stateful Failover
When Stateful Failover is enabled, the active unit continually passes per-connection state information to
the standby unit. After a failover occurs, the same connection information is available at the new active
unit. Supported end-user applications are not required to reconnect to keep the same communication
session.
The state information passed to the standby unit includes the following:
•
•
Cisco Security Appliance Command Line Configuration Guide
14-14
To provide load balancing, use Active/Active failover.
If you do not want to provide load balancing, use Active/Standby or Active/Active failover.
provides a comparison of some of the features supported by each type of failover
Failover Configuration Feature Support
Regular Failover, page 14-14
Stateful Failover, page 14-14
NAT translation table.
TCP connection states.
Chapter 14
Active/Active Active/Standby
No Yes
Yes Yes
Yes No
Yes Yes
Yes No
No No
Configuring Failover
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