Tips & Tricks: Fast Failover with BFD

[JayGolf]

Are you aware that the firewall supports Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD)?

BFD failure detection is very fast and as a result, allows for faster failover than native dynamic routing protocol failure mechanisms. The time to detect failures in existing routing protocols is no better than one second. BFD failure detection is extremely fast, providing for faster failover. With BFD, failures can be detected in less than 1 second! BFD creates a session between a firewall and its peer using a three-way handshake. Control packets that function like hello packets perform the handshake and negotiate session parameters in a BFD profile like minimum intervals at which the peers can send and receive control packets.

If a peer does not receive a control packet within the detection time (calculated as the negotiated transmit interval multiplied by a Detection Time Multiplier), the peer considers the session down. BFD then notifies the routing protocol to switch to an alternate path. 

To set up BFD, you can navigate to Network -> Network Profiles -> BFD Profile -> Create a new profile or use default timers. Once a profile is created, navigate to Network -> Virtual Routers -> Choose the type of routing -> Select BFD profile

If you are looking to provide high availability and fast failover to your network, give BFD a shot! 

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@JayGolf out!