Primary/Secondary Roles and Active/Standby Status

When setting up Active/Standby failover, you configure one unit to be primary and the other to be secondary. During configuration, the primary unit's policies are synchronized to the secondary unit. At this point, the two units act as a single device for device and policy configuration. However, for events, dashboards, reports and health monitoring, they continue to display as separate devices.

The main differences between the two units in a failover pair are related to which unit is active and which unit is standby, namely which IP addresses to use and which unit actively passes traffic.

However, a few differences exist between the units based on which unit is primary (as specified in the configuration) and which unit is secondary:

• The primary unit always becomes the active unit if both units start up at the same time (and are of equal operational health).

• The primary unit MAC addresses are always coupled with the active IP addresses. The exception to this rule occurs when the secondary unit becomes active and cannot obtain the primary unit MAC addresses over the failover link. In this case, the secondary unit MAC addresses are used.