You can configure pairs of routers to act as hot standbys for each other. This redundancy is configured on an interface basis. Pairs of redundant interfaces are known as redundancy groups. The figure below depicts the active-standby device scenario. It shows how the redundancy group is configured for a pair of routers that has one outgoing interface. The
Redundancy Group Configuration--Two Outgoing Interfaces figure depicts the active-active device scenario shows how two redundancy groups are configured for a pair of routers that have two outgoing interfaces.
Note that in both cases, the redundant routers are joined by a configurable control link and a data synchronization link. The control link is used to communicate the status of the routers. The data synchronization link is used to transfer stateful information from Network Address Translation (NAT) and the firewall and to synchronize the stateful database for these applications.
Also, in both cases, the pairs of redundant interfaces are configured with the same unique ID number known as the RII.
Figure 1. Redundancy Group Configuration--Two Outgoing Interfaces
The status of redundancy group members is determined through the use of hello messages sent over the control link. If either of the routers does not respond to a hello message within a configurable amount of time, it is considered that a failure has occurred, and a switchover is initiated. To detect a failure in milliseconds, the control links run the failover protocol integrated with the Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) protocol. You can configure the following parameters for the hello messages:
The hellotime defaults to 3 seconds to align with Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP), and the holdtime defaults to 10 seconds. You can also configure these timers in milliseconds by using the
timers
hellotime
msec command.
To determine which pairs of interfaces are affected by the switchover, you must configure a unique ID number for each pair of redundant interfaces. This ID number is known as the RII associated with the interface.
A switchover to the standby router can also occur under other circumstances. Another factor that can cause a switchover is a priority setting that is configurable for each router. The router with the highest priority value will be the active router. If a fault occurs on either the active or the standby router, the priority of the router is decremented by a configurable amount known as the weight. If the priority of the active router falls below the priority of the standby router, a switchover occurs and the standby router becomes the active router. This default behavior can be overridden by disabling the preemption attribute for the redundancy group. You can also configure each interface to decrease the priority when the L1 state of the interface goes down. This amount overrides the default amount configured for the redundancy group.
Each failure event that causes a modification of a redundancy group’s priority generates a syslog entry that contains a time stamp, the redundancy group that was affected, previous priority, new priority, and a description of the failure event cause.
Another situation that will cause a switchover to occur is when the priority of a router or interface falls below a configurable threshold level.
In general, a switchover to the standby router occurs under the following circumstances:
Power loss or reload occurs on the active router (this includes crashes).
The run-time priority of the active router goes down below that of the standby router.
The run-time priority of the active router goes down below the configured threshold value.
The redundancy group on the active router is reloaded manually using the
redundancy
application
reload
group
rg-number command.
- Two consecutive hello messages missed on any monitored interface forces the interface into testing mode. When this occurs, both units first verify the link status on the interface and then execute the following tests:
- Network activity test
- ARP test
- Broadcast ping test
In the Firewall Stateful Inter-Chassis Redundancy feature, the redundancy group traffic is routed through the virtual IP address that is associated with the ingress interface of the redundancy group. The traffic sent to the virtual IP address is received by the router that has the redundancy group in the active state. During a redundancy group failover, the traffic to the virtual IP address is automatically routed to the newly active redundancy group.
The firewall drops the traffic that arrives on the standby redundancy group in case the redundancy group traffic is routed through the physical IP address of a standby router and the traffic reaches the standby redundancy group. However, when the traffic arrives on the active redundancy group, the established TCP or UDP sessions are synchronized to the standby redundancy group.