Disabling and Re-Enabling HA

Issue

Maintenance work performed on the passive device in a HA pair to avoid traffic interruption has had the opposite affect, causing a failover of the active device to the passive . HA was disabled on the passive unit to replace a power supply, but the failover occurred as soon as HA was re-enabled on the passive device.

Resolution

When HA was re-enabled on the passive device, both devices entered the Active state and began the HA election process.  If both firewalls have the same priority setting, as was the case in this instance, the firewall with the lowest MAC address in the HA1 control link will become the active device.  The best result would be to avoid disabling (and re-enabling HA) during the maintenance process.

owner:  snisar