Chassis High Availability Active/Standby Mode

The Chassis Active/Standby mode is based on two synchronized Chassis. One Chassis handles traffic (Active), while the other Chassis is in the Standby state. The Standby Chassis is synchronized with the Active Chassis so that traffic continues uninterrupted when there is a Chassis failover.

To make sure that the most reliable Chassis is Active, each Chassis is assigned a quality grade based on continuous monitoring of its critical components. See set chassis high-availability factors for a detailed explanation of the grading system.

The Chassis with the highest quality grade automatically becomes the Active Chassis. Whenever the other Chassis grade is greater than the minimum grade gap for failover, failover occurs automatically. See Setting the minimum gap failover for details.

Each Chassis data port has its own unique MAC address. The MAC addresses on the SGMs of a Chassis are the same. The MAC addresses are different for the ports on both Chassis. A Chassis failover event sends GARP/ICMv6 packets for each interface. This tells the network to use the other interfaces. See GARP Chunk Mechanism for details.

You can use gclish commands to configure High Availability parameters such as:

• Active/Standby mode (Active UP/Primary UP)
• Chassis quality grade factors
• Failover grade difference for failover
• Failover freeze interval
• Port priority