topic Re: Is it possible to have 4 devices as active/active setup? in Automation/API Discussions

Is it possible to have 4 devices as active/active setup?

leandrobaida — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 18:32:43 GMT

Am I able to configure up to 4 devices to act as active/active in high availability?

This should be able to, if one of those 4 get down, the others 3 keep handling traffic. And if another one of those get down, the other 2 keep running and so on.

Is it possible? If it is not, is there any roadmap for so?

Re: Is it possible to have 4 devices as active/active setup?

garevalo — Fri, 02 May 2014 20:47:26 GMT

This is not possible using the existing HA functionality. I cannot speak to the roadmap though...

Re: Is it possible to have 4 devices as active/active setup?

eratermann — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 17:58:51 GMT

You could configure four stand-alone devices, each on a separate leg of a aggregated ethernet link to achieve a similar result. It is very similar to the published solution working with Arista switches show here:https://paloaltonetworks.com/content/dam/paloaltonetworks-com/en_US/assets/pdf/technology-solutions-briefs/arista.pdf

Re: Is it possible to have 4 devices as active/active setup?

pulukas — Sat, 28 Jun 2014 00:18:57 GMT

All clusters in PA are just two identical units. You could have two pairs with the four units but the sessions and sync are only between the tow matched devices at a time.

This is unlikely to change in the next few years.

For a very large volume operation you might use load balancers in front of the four or more PA to get higher capacity and failover across multiple clusters.

Re: Is it possible to have 4 devices as active/active setup?

DavePATS — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 03:30:32 GMT

Palo Alto Networks devices do not aggregate throughput across HA cluster members. Active/Active throughput is same as Active/Passive. For situations in which more throughput than a PA-5060 can provide is required you would utilize the PA-7000 series chassis system. With two chassis you can have anywhere between two and ten data plane cards, each capable of processing around the same traffic as a PA-5060. This scenario would not require third party load balancers and provides increased flexibility over that model. Session sync across all dataplanes in both chassis regardless of Layer 3 or Virtual Wire deployments.

Re: Is it possible to have 4 devices as active/active setup?

ajbool — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 07:06:47 GMT

I disagree - in Active/Active traffic load can be shared between the two devices; although I understand that Palo Alto recommends that they're not sized such that both devices are required to be forwarding traffic to handle the load as in the event of a failure traffic processing would surely be impacted.

Of course, they'd also love to sell you a PA7000.

I'd rather not throw away good firewalls though; and being able to extend an existing PA5000 pair to a cluster of greater than two devices would be great.

The method PAN have chosen for the configuration of Active/Active seems to be designed to support such a model - with the physical device configuration elements (mainly IP addresses) being configured locally on each device. For the current two device model; it would be so much easier if in Active/Active Panorama templates there was space to enter primary IP and a secondary IPs directly which would be applied to the corresponding firewalls - but they've not done it like this and I suspect that is to allow for future clustering support.

My guess; they can do this in their labs; but they won't release it as the sales teams want to sell PA7000s instead....