Monitoring High Availability

On the High Availability > Monitoring page, you can specify IP addresses that the SonicWALL security appliance uses to complete an ICMP ping on to determine link viability. When using logical monitors, the SonicWALL pings the defined Probe IP Address target from the Primary as well as the Backup SonicWALL. If both can successfully ping the target, no failover occurs. If both cannot successfully ping the target, no failover occurs, as the SonicWALLs assumes that the problem is with the target, and not the SonicWALLs. But, if one SonicWALL can ping the target but the other SonicWALL cannot, it will failover to the SonicWALL that can ping the target.

Pv6 High Availability (HA) Monitoring is implemented as an extension of HA Monitoring in IPv4. After configuring HA Monitoring for IPv6, both the primary and backup appliances can be managed from the IPv6 monitoring address, and IPv6 Probing is capable of detecting the network status of HA pairs. The IPv6 HA Monitoring configuration page is inherited from IPv4, so the configuration procedures are almost identical.

Consider the following when configuring IPv6 HA Monitoring:

•	The Physical/Link Monitoring and Virtual MAC check boxes are greyed out because they are layer two properties. That is, the properties are used by both IPv4 and IPv6, so user has to configure them in the IPv4 monitoring page.

•	The primary/backup IPv6 address must be in the same subnet of the interface, and it cannot be same as the global IP and Link-Local-IP of the primary/backup appliance.

•	If the primary/backup monitoring IP is set to (not ::), then they cannot be the same.

•	If Management is enabled, then the primary/backup monitoring IP cannot be unspecified (such as ::).

•	If the probe check box is enabled, then the probe IP cannot be unspecified.

To configure interface monitoring between the primary and backup appliances, complete the following steps:

1	Expand the High Availability tree and click Monitoring. The Monitoring Settings page displays.

 

2	Click the configure icon for the X0 interface. The Interface X0 Monitoring Settings window displays.

 

3	Enter the LAN management IP address for the primary appliance in the Primary IP Address field.

4	Enter the LAN management IP address for the backup appliance in the Secondary IP Address field.

5

(Optional) Check Enable Interface Monitoring and enter the IP address of a reliable device on the LAN network in the Probe IP Address field. This should be a downstream router or server. The primary and backup appliances will regularly ping this probe IP address. If both can successfully ping the target, no failover occurs. If neither can successfully ping the target, no failover occurs, because it is assumed that the problem is with the target, and not the SonicWALL appliances. But, if one appliance can ping the target but the other appliance cannot, failover occurs to the appliance that can ping the target.

6

(Optional) To manually specify the virtual MAC address, check Manual Virtual MAC and enter a MAC address. SonicWALL recommends that you manually configure the virtual MAC address only if the appliances do not have Internet access (for example, in secure network environments). Allowing the appliances to retrieve the virtual MAC address from the SonicWALL back end eliminates the possibility of configuration errors and ensures the uniqueness of the virtual MAC address, which prevents possible conflicts.

7

Click OK.

8	Click the configure icon for the X1 interface and repeat steps 3 through 7 for the WAN IP addresses on the primary and backup appliances.