Clustering question

[the_rock]

Hey guys,

I have unique inquiry from the customer, but not sure if this is something that can be done easily or not. Here is the situation...customer has main Internet gw (I believe 6000 model) and we upgraded it from R77.30 to R80.40 and that worked, BUT, what they wanted to do is add another brand new 6000 model into a cluster with current Internet fw, but keep the main fw IP as the clustered IP. We attempted this couple of months back, but ran into huge roadblock, where we had to change default gw, then dns was all messed up, and it turned out to be a nightmare.

TAC tried helping us, but even person on the phone was stuck, so we just decided to abandon the whole idea and revert the changes.

Here is my question, is there a good process or steps on how this should be done? Not sure if anyone attempted to do this before. Say, if you have main Internet fw and main IP is 50.60.70.90 and you want to keep SAME IP as the clustered VIP, is that even doable? I read the R80.40 cluster guide and could not find anything about scenario like this (unless I did not look hard enough : ))

Anyway, if anyone has any ideas, suggestions, would be greatly appreciated!

Andy