High Availability Overview

Clusters, by definition, provide redundancy and high availability at the gateway level. Link Aggregation, however, adds interface and switch redundancy by providing automatic failover to a standby interface card within the same VSX Gateway.

In a High Availability deployment, only one interface is active at a time. If an interface or connection fails, the bond fails over to a standby slave interface. Bonding High Availability failover occurs in one of these cases:

• An active interface detects a link state failure in a monitored interface.
• ClusterXL detects a failure in sending or receiving Cluster Control Protocol (CCP) keep-alive packets.

Included Topics Fully Meshed Redundancy via Interface Bonding

Fully Meshed Redundancy via Interface Bonding

The Link Aggregation High Availability mode, when deployed with ClusterXL, enables a higher level of reliability by providing granular redundancy in the network. This granular redundancy is achieved by using a fully meshed topology, which provides for independent backups for both NICs and switches.

In this scenario:

• Member-1 and Member-2 are cluster members in the High Availability mode
• S-1 and S-2 are switches
• C-1, C-2, C-3 and C-4 are network connections