Enhanced support for deploying high volume active-active HA with a load balancer (7.6.1)

Previously, in the high-volume active-active mode, multiple virtual IPs (VIP) are assigned to each member with different priority levels. In this configuration, traffic for a specific virtual IP is only directed to the member that has set this virtual IP with the highest priority. If that member becomes unavailable, the traffic will automatically reroute to other members configured with that virtual IP, ensuring continuous service and load distribution among the remaining members. This is called the "Single" mode high volume active-active HA, which means that each member has only one primarily VIP.

In the example below, traffic to VIP 2 is primarily directed to FortiWeb B. If FortiWeb B becomes unavailable, traffic to VIP 2 will be automatically rerouted to FortiWeb A or C, ensuring continuity of service.

Starting from version 7.6.1, we have introduced the "all" mode for high-volume active-active HA. In this mode, the virtual IPs (VIPs) assigned to each member do not have differing priority levels. Instead, traffic to any VIP can be processed equally by all members in the HA group.

As shown in the following table, VIP 1, VIP 2, and VIP 3 are active on all members, allowing every FortiWeb instance to handle requests for each VIP. The traffic distribution across the members is managed by the load balancer deployed in front of the FortiWeb cluster, ensuring balanced traffic processing without reliance on priority levels.

You can run the following command to switch between "single" and "all" modes.

config system ha

set mode active-active-high-volume

set distribution {single | all}

end

This configuration is available only in the CLI and is not accessible through the GUI.

By default, "all" mode is used for FortiWeb-VM HA on public cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure) and on KVM with the UDP tunnel network type, as it is common to deploy a load balancer in front of FortiWeb in these environments. For other platforms and hardware FortiWeb devices, the default high-volume active-active HA mode is set to "single" mode.

In "all" mode for high-volume active-active HA, traffic is managed by the load balancer. Therefore, the "Node Allocation" and "Traffic Distribution" tabs are not available when high-volume active-active HA is set to "all" mode, as traffic distribution is entirely handled by the load balancer.

For more information, see Configuring HA settings specifically for high volume active-active mode.