Cluster high availability with more that two gateways

[Michael_Horne]

Hello,

Can someone confirm if it is possible to have a high availability cluster with 3 gateways acting in a Active / Passive / Passive set-up?

This kind of set-up may sound a bit strange, so I will explain the design challenge. Maybe someone else has a design for this specific set-up

We have a virtual data center made up of two physical locations in different cities. Currently we have a HA cluster with a security gateway in each location. The data center is is active / passive, with all the active machines in one of the physical locations. When the active security gateway is in the passive data center location the inter-VLAN latency increases from <1 ms  to 6 ms and this causes some application issues.  We can make sure that the when the security gateway in active data center location is available that it is the active security gateway of the cluster.

There is a concern that if the security gateway in the active data center location is down for a long time that this will cause issues. The question was raised about having two firewalls in the active data center location an and a third firewall in the passive data center location. The idea would be to have a fail over in the active data center location to the second firewall and only fail over to the third security gateway in the passive data center location, if both firewalls in the active data center location are both unavailable.

Many thanks,

Michael

[Chris_Atkinson]

This configuration is possible, member nodes can be assigned a priority to help with predictable behavior.

Please refer to the Cluster XL admin guide for more information.

[Daniel_Taney]

Yes, you absolutely can do that. I have a 3-way cluster of 5100's in a location because 3 x 5100's with no redundant power supplies are still way cheaper than 2 x 5600's with redundant power.