09-16-2008 03:05 AM - edited 03-11-2019 06:44 AM
We have a primary ASA5540 at our head office which provides our main site internet connection and terminates all the IPSEC VPNs to our remote sites.
We also have a secondary ASA5540 at our âfailoverâ site where we have another internet pipe. The idea being that, if there is a problem with our main internet pipe or primary ASA, comms will failover to the secondary ASA and we will still have connectivity.
The head office and failover sites are a few miles apart and are connected by a LES (LAN Extension Service) circuit. We have a core switch at each site with an isolated âfailoverâ VLAN configured for the connections between the 2 ASA firewalls. The switch ports are configured with âspanning-tree portfastâ enabled and trunking disabled ("switchport mode access")
The issue we are facing is that, whenever a failover occurs (e.g. if main internet pipe goes down) then the failover to the secondary unit happens but we seem to lose connectivity with all our remote offices.
I have attached a diagram to show the basic set-up and also included the "show run failover" and "show failover" output (with IP addresses removed) from each unit.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to what the issue might be and how we can set this up so that all connectivity (including remote VPN connections) will resume when a failover occurs?
It's also a difficult one to troubleshoot as we need downtime in order to test it (as all remote sites connect over the primary internet pipe) - if we organise a test window, can anyone suggest the best debugging/troubleshooting commands to run in order to help us resolve the issue?
Any help/advice on this one would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks.
09-16-2008 04:55 AM
as long as u are runing active/standby NOT active/active failover mode then u can use stateful failover to support IPsec vpn
and u need to consider stateful failover on ur firewalls
have alook at the following link which is very helpful :
for show and debuge use:
show failover
show failover | include Failed
debug fo ?
exec mode commands/options:
cable Failover LAN status
fail Failover internal exception
fmsg Failover message
ifc Network interface status trace
open Failover device open
rx Failover Message receive
rxdmp Failover recv message dump (serial console only)
rxip IP network failover packet recv
switch Failover Switching status
sync Failover config/command replication
tx Failover Message xmit
txdmp Failover xmit message dump (serial console only)
txip IP network failover packet xmit
verify Failover message verify
To troubleshoot issues related to failover timing, use the debug fo rxip and debug fo txip commands to determine if the packets are being exchanged according to the configured polltimes
good luck
if helpful Rate
09-16-2008 06:01 AM
Thanks - I'll have a look at some of those commands you've suggested.
As far as the stateful failover is concerned, I believe we have that configured already:
failover interface ip failover *.*.*.1 *.*.*.* standby *.*.*.2
Any further advice/suggestions would be welcome!
09-16-2008 06:10 AM
if u are not concerned too much about the session get disconnected and reconnected again
on the remote routers u can make another crypto map with the same name but higher sequence number includ the same interesting traffic and other option except the set peer command which will be the secondary ASA
so u will have one crypto map on each remote router with two sequence numbers fist map with lower sequence number point to ASA 1 and the second one point to the secondary ASA
but this way one ASA one or its link gos down the remote routers will re intiate the tunnel again to the second one when they get interesting traffic
and works even without failover this way
good luck
if helpful Rate
if helpful Rate
09-16-2008 08:26 AM
Thanks for the further suggestion.
I wouldn't be too concerned about the sessions disconnecting and reconnecting again (as long as it was for a reasonably short time period)
However, unless I've not quite understood things correctly, I'm not sure your suggestion would work with our set-up. Because, with failover, the ASA devices "share" the same IP addresses (so the secondary ASA would take over the primary's IP addresses in a failover situation) which would mean configuring a second peer in the remote router would have no effect.
If we disabled failover and just included the secondary ASA as an alternative peer on the remote routers, I still don't think it would help as a) our head office users would still lose their internet access if the primary internet pipe failed (since no failover) and b) the routing back out to the remote offices would fail since head office devices would still be routing to the primary ASA.
10-24-2008 07:51 AM
Just in case anyone is suffering a similar problem, this turned out to be a Cisco software bug. We were running 7.2(4) when we experienced the failover problem but upgraded to 7.2(4)9 and this resolved the issue.
The related bugs seem to have been:
CSCsl52895 - ASA 7.2.3 number of IPSec SA not replicated in failover unit.
CSCsl82200 - IPSec not encrypting after failover
03-09-2009 07:34 AM
There is also another bug to be aware of: search for CSCsi18736 in the bug toolkit.
hope this helps
03-29-2010 06:35 AM
Failover does not work properly over LES circuits, it has something to do with the switches in the provider not coping with the mac address swap
03-29-2010 06:58 AM
Thats interesting, do you have any more information on that?
Our failover seems to work ok now and we are still using LES circuits. However, I've never been completely convinced by it!
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