HA2 Options

MichaelMedwid — Wed, 26 May 2021 13:42:40 GMT

What is the advantage of using the HSCI port for HA2 as opposed to using one or two data ports?

Would a QSFP-40G-CR4 be compatible with the HSCI port?

Or a SFP-H10GB-AOC5M? SFP-1000BAS?

Re: HA2 Options

BPry — Thu, 27 May 2021 01:58:21 GMT

@MichaelMedwid,

Keep in mind that the HSCI interfaces actually differ between models. So on the PA-3200 series it's all SFP+, on a 5220 it's QSFP+, but all other 52** models it's a QSFP28 ports.

@MichaelMedwid wrote:

What is the advantage of using the HSCI port for HA2 as opposed to using one or two data ports?

The HSCI port carries raw traffic that are fully meant to be directly connected to each other. The firewall actually treats this traffic very much the same as the management port, something it can't do when you setup a dataplane port as an HA interface. Functionally, I can't say that I've ever ran into a situation outside of the 7000-series where either option doesn't work perfectly fine.

If your environment supports HSCI I would use it. If you choose to locate your firewall peers in different buildings that don't have the infrastructure to support a direct connection as HSCI demands without going through a switch, or fiber infrastructure that wasn't built around supporting QSFP then just use dataplane interfaces.

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HA2 Options

Re: HA2 Options