Is Graceful shutdown a good idea to invoke Failover ?

[Francky3084]

Hello,

Next to a project that I have to acheive in some days, i've been searching for a answer to my questions that I haven't found.
That why I try here now and I hope you will be able to assist me 🙂

Due to a UPS maintenance, I will have to unplug our two Palo Alto from power. We have two Power Domain, so one PA is on a PD and the other one is on another PD. 

I would like to be the cleanest possible to provoke the failover from the Active PA (that I will have to unplug from power) to the other PA that will stay in service during this time. I've been thinking that making a Graceful shutdown of the Active PA before unplugging it from power can be a good idea.

My question(s) :

- Is the graceful shutdown a good idea ?

- Will the passive unit take the lead when I will make the graceful shutdown executed on the active ?

In advance many thanks and feel free to tell me if i'm not clear.
Have a nice day !
Franck

[reaper · Accepted solution]

Hi Franck

A gracefull shutdown will certainly work, especially if you're going to need to power down anyway. Alternatively you can suspend the active device

admin@myNGFW> request high-availability state suspend 

In both cases the passive unit will assume the active role (do a quick 'show session all' on the passive unit to ensure it is properly receiving session information from the active peer)

[Francky3084]

Wow, that was quick, thanks you 🙂

Ok so now I feel more safe, also thanks you for your alternative.
A very last question : Is there a best practice regarding my kind of operation ? (To have the smoothier experience possible and the less disruption time possible)

Or what we talk is already sufficient ?

Thanks again for your quickness and good afternoon !

[reaper · Accepted solution]

Hi Franck

I guess your situation leans closely to the PAN-OS upgrade process for which there is a best practices : https://live.paloaltonetworks.com/t5/Featured-Articles/Best-Practices-for-PAN-OS-Upgrade/ta-p/111045

similar steps, using the suspend method

what physically happens when the active device is suspended or shut down:

- the active should already have synced it's ctive sessions over to the passive device so it can continue processing existing sessions

- the passive device brings its interfaces online

- once interfaces are up, sends out a gratuitous ARP to inform all neighbours it is now in charge of the MAC addresses associated with your cluster

- neighbours start sending all packets to passive device

- passive device starts creating new sessions for all SYN packets received, continues processing packets for existing sessions

[Francky3084]

Perfect ! Thanks a lot again reaper !

[Brandon_Wertz]

If you have GUI access and prefer to use it the same command via CLI is also in the GUI