High availability
FortiGate-VM high availability (HA) supports having two VMs in an HA cluster on the same physical platform or different platforms. The primary consideration is that all interfaces involved can communicate efficiently over TCP/IP connection sessions.
Heartbeat
There are two options for setting up the HA heartbeat: unicast and broadcast. Broadcast is the default HA heartbeat configuration. However, the broadcast configuration may not be ideal for FortiGate-VM because it may require special settings on the host. In most cases, the unicast configuration is preferable.
Differences between the unicast and broadcast heartbeat setups are:
- The unicast method does not change the FortiGate-VM interface MAC addresses to virtual MAC addresses.
- Unicast HA only supports two FortiGate-VMs.
- Unicast HA heartbeat interfaces must be connected to the same network and you must add IP addresses to these interfaces.
Unicast
You can configure the unicast settings in the FortiOS CLI:
config system ha
set unicast-hb {enable/disable}
set unicast-hb-peerip {Peer heartbeat interface IP address}
end
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Setting |
Description |
|---|---|
|
|
Enable or disable default unicast HA heartbeat. |
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|
IP address of the HA heartbeat interface of the other FortiGate-VM in the HA cluster. |
Broadcast
Broadcast HA heartbeat packets are non-TCP packets that use Ethertype values 0x8890, 0x8891, and 0x8890. These packets use automatically assigned link-local IPv4 addresses in the 169.254.0.x range for HA heartbeat interface IP addresses.
For FortiGate-VMs to support a broadcast HA heartbeat configuration, you must configure the virtual switches that connect heartbeat interfaces to support MAC address spoofing.
In addition, you must configure the VM platform to allow MAC address spoofing for the FortiGate-VM data interfaces. This is required because in broadcast mode, the FGCP applies virtual MAC addresses to FortiGate data interfaces, and these virtual MAC addresses mean that matching interfaces of the FortiGate-VM instances in the cluster have the same virtual MAC addresses.
With the correct MAC spoofing settings, you can configure high availability between two or more FortiGate-VM for Hyper-V instances.