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.

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.

Item	Description		Item	Description
1	Switch 1		5	Network connection 2
2	Switch 2		6	Network connection 3
3	Network connection 1		7	VSX Cluster Member 1
4	Network connection 4		8	VSX Cluster Member 2

In this scenario - VSX Cluster Members 1 and 2 are configured in the High Availability mode.