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Prisma SD-WAN Administrator’s Guide

Prisma SD-WAN Branch High Availability

Table of Contents

Prisma SD-WAN Branch High Availability

Let us learn how to configure high availability for branch sites in Prisma SD-WAN.

Where Can I Use This?	What Do I Need?
Prisma SD-WAN	Active Prisma SD-WAN license

Prisma SD-WAN offers a unique branch HA solution ensuring full WAN capacity in the case of an ION device failure. This is achieved by leveraging the fail-to-wire capabilities and HA group technology of ION devices at a branch site. Prisma SD-WAN High Availability (HA), ensures automatic failover between active and backup devices, maintaining all services and forwarding paths when an ION device experiences a software, hardware, or network related failure.

At most, one HA group may be created per branch site and up to two devices can be bound to a group. One of the devices in the group will be elected as active, and the second device, if present, will be the backup device.

The Active device performs traffic forwarding and monitoring functions, including path selection, BGP peering, usable VPN establishment, advertising and learning routes, reporting statistics, alerts, and alarms.
The Backup device merely bridges traffic to the active device and will not perform path selection, and advertise and learn routes. It reports a limited set of statistics, alerts, and alarms. Also in some topologies it may establish VPNs to remote endpoints, but these will not be usable while the device is in a backup state.

The HA control interface is used to determine which device is active or backup synchronizes some state information between the ION devices (e.g. DHCP server leases). The HA control interface can be any Layer 3 interface on the ION device with a statically configured IP address. However, we recommend using the Controller port as long as the interfaces are within the same subnet. In topologies where the controller ports are in two different subnets, use a different pair of ports that are in the same subnet and dedicate those interfaces for HA control.

Read on to understand the key concepts, topologies, and how to configure branch HA.

Prisma SD-WAN Incident Policies

Prisma SD-WAN Branch HA Key Concepts