Section 6:Failover Configuration

Failover provides redundancy for the ASA in the event of hardware of software failure. The ASA supports two types of failover:

Hardware failover provides redundancy in case of a hardware failure. This is achieved with another ASA that acts as a standby unit to take over from the primary ASA in the event of a failure. With hardware failover, the connections are dropped, and clients much reestablish their sessions.

Stateful failover passes per-connection state information from the active to the standby unit. In the event of a failure, the state table is on the standby unit, and most client applications would not require reconnecting. This should offer transparency to the end user if a failover occurs.

There are two modes of operation for failover, and we cover these throughout the rest of this section: