Pre-established BGP connection to HA?

[jbraswell32]

All,
I'm looking to set up established BGP connections from the upstream routers (Cisco Nexus) to the HA unit in our A/P setup for faster failover times, and to not make it look weird when trying to determine if adjacencies are up to the primary unit from the router side. I know there's some things that can be established, LACP and the like, but don't see an option for BGP anywhere. Is there a way to do this, or is this not a good idea? What other optimizations should be run in A/P BGP setup to ensure a fast failover to the HA unit? I've seen mention of BFD but haven't tried this yet, I'm curious to see if that helps me out. To be clear, I haven't tested failover yet, so I don't know if this is an issue that I'm trying to solve before it's a problem. Thanks for the help, looking forward to some good answers!

[TomYoung]

Hi @jbraswell32 ,

With regard to A/P HA, BGP Graceful Restart (GR) is recommended for faster failover.

https://knowledgebase.paloaltonetworks.com/KCSArticleDetail?id=kA10g000000CltgCAC

The GR feature is designed to keep the BGP neighbor from dropping and routes continuing to forward during the failover process.

Thanks,

Tom