VPN Mesh Tunnel Question on On-Premise Smart-1 server/Quantum Spark 1600 Firewalls

[rdiaz]

Greetings CheckMates,

I'm still fairly new to Check Point and trying to understand how the VPN Tunnels work the Quantum Spark world of firewalls.

I had an incident today where my internet connection went down (this is where my Smart-1 Server lives/on-premise with 2-HA Pair of 1600s firewall).  I noticed that none of my mesh connections worked during the outage (between other sites since I have about 7 of them).  Is the Smart-1 keeping those connections alive and if for any reason the Smart-1 server goes down the mesh goes down with it?

and if this is so, how can I create a mesh network that doesn't rely on the Smart-1 server or do I need to go Cloud with Check Point to avoid this from happening?

Any input is very appreciated. 🙂