HA to standalone best practise

[LliLliWong]

Hello,

Good day, I have found many articles related to configuring standalone to HA. However, I don't find related articles for HA to standalone.

Is there any good reference guide for changing role from HA (active-active or active-passive) to standalone (including best practise) or pre-caution and steps that we need to take note with and without Panorama? Is there any detailed backup steps (what backup file type that we can generate and how do we validate is the correct backup that is usable for standalone), do we need to upgrade to preferred firmware, any change of serial or licensing before changing it to standalone? 

Thank you.

[reaper]

i dont think there are any reference guides, as going back from cluster to standalone isn't exactly common (or best practice 😉 )

technically, you can simply turn HA off and everything will keep working

all you need to take into account is that at the network layer, the MAC addresss of your interfaces will change so you may need to update some ARP tables

[BPry]

@LliLliWong,

Something else to keep in mind when you remove a unit from an HA pair; you likely bought HA pair licensing when you renewed or bought licensing. I'm not sure that PAN actually cares and I've never had the license just stop working or anything, but it may be something to inquire about and its definitely something to keep in mind come renewals. 

Outside of that you kind of just disable HA and it'll remove itself from the pair. Just keep in mind that you'll want to have the passive device shutdown and removed from the network before you do so, otherwise you'll end up in a split-brain scenario. The MAC changes are also something to keep in mind as @reaper noted.