BGP Across Two Data Centers

[RHO]

hey all, we have a customer who currently has two PA-2050 nodes setup with HA at one location.

they would like to split the pair and have one PA-2050 at Site1 and the other at Site2 ... setup as Active/Standby.

There would be two private L2 networks between them - one for the HA/keepalive and the other to tie in the inside interfaces.

each pa-2050 would have a "single" BGP connection to its own ISP, advertising the same block.

site1 would only have bgp to isp1 and site2 would only have bgp to isp2

site1 would be preferred for both ingress/egress traffic, and site2 would be backup in case site1 fails.

is this possible? so far, have read docs where both pa's have to be at the same location where they connect to both isp's.

thanks in advance!

[pulukas]

I think for this application you are going to need to be active/active.  In an active/passive setup the passive device interfaces are held in a down state until failover.  You cannot have that active BGP session going in this scenario.  The alternative is you peer to both ISP from the active device.

Just to clarify your connectivity,  you will need layer 2 on HA 1 & HA2 for Active/passive and you would need to add a third vlan for HA3 if you have active/active.  Also note that these need to have jumbo frames and low latency.