Guidelines for Threat Defense Virtual Clustering

High Availability

High Availability is not supported with clustering.

IPv6

The cluster control link is only supported using IPv4.

Additional Guidelines

  • When significant topology changes occur (such as adding or removing an EtherChannel interface, enabling or disabling an interface on the threat defense virtual, adding an additional switch to form a VSS or vPC, configuring IP addresses or interface flap on the cluster) you should disable the health check feature and also disable interface monitoring for the interfaces that are affected by the topology changes. When the topology change is complete, and the configuration change is synced to all units, you can re-enable the interface health check feature.

  • When adding a unit to an existing cluster, or when reloading a unit, there will be a temporary, limited packet/connection drop; this is expected behavior. In some cases, the dropped packets can hang your connection; for example, dropping a FIN/ACK packet for an FTP connection will make the FTP client hang. In this case, you need to reestablish the FTP connection.

  • For decrypted TLS/SSL connections, the decryption states are not synchronized, and if the connection owner fails, then decrypted connections will be reset. New connections will need to be established to a new unit. Connections that are not decrypted (they match a do-not-decrypt rule) are not affected and are replicated correctly.

  • We do not support VXLANs for data interfaces; only the cluster control link supports VXLAN.

Defaults for Clustering

  • The cLACP system ID is auto-generated, and the system priority is 1 by default.

  • The cluster health check feature is enabled by default with the holdtime of 3 seconds. Interface health monitoring is enabled on all interfaces by default.

  • The cluster auto-rejoin feature for a failed cluster control link is unlimited attempts every 5 minutes.

  • The cluster auto-rejoin feature for a failed data interface is 3 attempts every 5 minutes, with the increasing interval set to 2.

  • Connection replication delay of 5 seconds is enabled by default for HTTP traffic.