Ensure ‘Failover’ is enabled

Details

Enables failover between the security appliance and another security appliance in order to achieve high availability

Rationale:

Enabling failover helps to meet the availability requirement of the security CIA (Confidentiality – Integrity – Availability) triad, ensuring a physical and logical redundancy of firewalls in order to avoid service disruption should the security appliance or its component fails. It requires to identical systems in hardware and software version connected through a failover and a state links.

Solution

Follow the steps below to enable active/standby failover. The commands are run in the system execution space

Step 1: For each appliance, identify the failover link physical interface and assign it a name and IP address and subnet mask . Identify the other device IP address for each appliance as

Step 2: For each appliance, identify the state link physical interface and assign it a name and IP address and subnet mask . Identify the other device IP address for each appliance as

Step 3: Run the following on the Active device to set it as primary node

hostname(config)#failover lan unit primary

Step 4: Run the following on the Standby device to set it as secondary node

hostname(config)#failover lan unit secondary

Step 5: Run the following on both security appliances

hostname(config)#failover lan interface
hostname(config)#failover interface ip standby hostname(config)#interface
hostname(config-if)#no shutdown
hostname(config)#failover link
hostname(config)#failover interface ip standby hostname(config)#interface
hostname(config-if)#no shutdown
hostname(config)#failover
hostname(config)#write memory

Default Value:

Disabled by default

Supportive Information

The following resource is also helpful.

This security hardening control applies to the following category of controls within NIST 800-53: Configuration Management.This control applies to the following type of system Cisco.

References

Source

Updated on July 16, 2022
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