By default, when configuring the ACE 4710s in a HA/FT environment, the FT groups are configured with 'preempt' so the higher priority ACE4710 will always become active and will force the Standby ACE to failover back to it.
If desired, you can disable 'preempt' under the FT groups so that when a failover occurs, the higher priority ACE will not preempt when it is available and force the Standby ACE to failover back to it. . Without 'preempt', the priorities only apply if both ACE4710 were rebooted at the same time and had to negotiate who becomes Active.
Example;
ft group #
peer 1
no preempt
priority 150
peer priority 105
associate-context
inservice
Alternatively, if you want to use the 'preempt' option but would like to delay the actual failover between the Active/Standby_HOT ACE4710s you can use the "carrier-delay" feature under the interface configurations.
Per the user docs:
Configuring a Delay at the Physical Port Level
If you connect an ACE to a Catalyst 6500 series switch, your configuration on the Catalyst may include the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). However, the ACE does not support STP. In this case, you may find that the Layer 2 convergence time is much longer than the physical port up time. For example, the physical port would normally be up within 3 seconds, but STP moving to the forward state may need approximately 30 seconds. During this transitional time, although the ACE declares the port to be up, the traffic will not pass.
To add a configurable delay at the physical port level to address this transition time, based on the variety of peers, use the carrier-delay command.
The syntax for this command is as follows:
carrier-delay seconds
The seconds argument specifies the carrier transition delay in seconds. Valid values are 0 to 120 seconds. The default is 0 (no carrier delay).
For example, to add a configurable delay of 60 seconds at the physical port level for Ethernet port 3, enter:
host1/Admin(config)# interface gigabitEthernet 1/3
host1/Admin(config-if)# carrier-delay 60
I hope this information helps.
