Active/Active HA on 7050

[dschuemann]

I'm getting ready to implement an Active/Active setup on a 7050. What is the best practice for bandwidth over the HA links? I'm more curious about the HA2 and HA3 links.

[HULK]

Hello dschuemann

Setting the session owner and the setup device to be the primary device is not recommended since all traffic processing will be performed by the active-primary device. However, for the sake troubleshooting and capturing logs and pcapsit can be useful to set the session owner and setuptoprimary since the packet processing will not be split between the devices in the cluster. For all other purposes the recommended setting is to use “First Packet” for session owner and “IP modulo” for session setup.

I would recommend you to follow the DOC for more detail info: Configuring Active/Active HA PAN-OS 4.0

Hope this helps.

Thanks

[pulukas]

The HA3 link will carry all traffic twice (hairpin) that arrives on one node while the opposite is the session owner that requires processing of profiles.  In some situations this can be a significant portion of traffic so the link would need to be sized accordingly.

For example, if you use bgp traffic engineering through an Active/Active pair with PA1 as primary and the recommended first packet session owner all the sessions are owned for processing on PA1.  When traffic engineering fails over to device PA2 because of upstream or downstream router failures but both PA are online, the packets now arrive and egress on PA2 but PA1 is session owner.  the packets go across the HA3 link for processing and return for egress.  HA3 should be sized to accept this doubled traffic.