Sidewinder G2 6.1.2 Administration Guide - Glossary of Technical ...

Chapter 17: High Availability
Managing an HA cluster
This must be a dedicated heartbeat burb. For information on configuring
a dedicated heartbeat burb, see “Configuring the heartbeat burbs” on
page 493.
d In the Heartbeat Verification Burb drop-down list, select the burb that
HA will use to send or receive a mini-heartbeat. This should be a burb
that regularly passes traffic, such as the internal burb.
This mini-heartbeat helps protect against false failover events by doing
the following:
• If the Sidewinder G2 does not detect the heartbeat but does detect
the mini-heartbeat, the HA cluster does not fail over. An audit
message is generated, alerting the administrator to check the
heartbeat burbs’ connectivity.
Important: Loss of communications on the heartbeat burb causes
diminished HA services. For load sharing, the active secondary no longer
shares the session load; it goes to a standby state. For non-load sharing,
the standby cannot receive updated information about new ipfilter sessions
established on the primary. Maintain high availability service to your network
by troubleshooting the heartbeat burbs’ communication problems as soon
as possible.
• If the Sidewinder G2 does not detect either the heartbeat or the miniheartbeat,
the HA cluster fails over.
Additional information on heartbeat verification is available in knowledge
base article 3848.
2 In the IPSec Authentication area, do the following:
• In the Authentication Type field, select the type of IPSec authentication
to use for HA:
—SHA1: Select this option if using HMAC-SHA1 authentication.
—MD5: Select this option if using HMAC-MD5 authentication
e In the Password field, type the password that will be used to generate
the authentication key for IPSec. This password must be the same for
both Sidewinder G2s because they share the same virtual firewall ID.
3 [Conditional] The Pair Members table lists the Sidewinder G2s that have
been added to the HA cluster. To add a Sidewinder G2 to the Pair Members
table, see “Adding a placeholder in the HA cluster” on page 498. To view
the status of the cluster, click Cluster Status. A pop-up window will appear
displaying the status of each Sidewinder G2. To close the status information
window, click Close.
This table is not available until you successfully promote a primary. Once
the primary has been promoted, you can add a second Sidewinder G2 to
the HA cluster. However, you must join the second Sidewinder G2 before it
will become functional within the HA cluster. See “Joining a Sidewinder G2
to an existing HA cluster” on page 499 for information on registering a
Sidewinder G2 to an HA cluster.
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