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Cisco ASA 5500 Series Configuration Guide using the CLI
Chapter63 Configuring Active/Active Failover
Licensing Requirements for Active/Active Failover

Optional Active/Active Failover Settings

You can configure the following Active/Standby failover options when you initially configuring failover
or after failover has been configured:
Failover Group Preemption—Assigns a primary or secondary priority to a failover group to specify
on which unit in the failover group becomes active when both units boot simultaneously.
HTTP replication with Stateful Failover—Allows connections to be included in the state
information replication.
Interface monitoring—Allows you to monitor up to 250 interfaces on a unit and control which
interfaces affect your failover.
Interface health monitoring—Enables the security appliance to detect and respond to interface
failures more quickly.
Failover criteria setup—Allows you to specify a specific number of interfaces or a percentage of
monitored interfaces that must fail before failover occurs.
Virtual MAC address configuration—Ensures that the secondary unit uses the correct MAC
addresses when it is the active unit, even if it comes online before the primary unit.
Licensing Requirements for Active/Active Failover
The following table shows the licensing requirements for this feature:
Failover link failed at startup No failover Become active Become active If the failover link is down at
startup, both failover groups on
both units become active.
Stateful Failover link failed No failover No action No action State information becomes out of
date, and sessions are terminated if
a failover occurs.
Failover link failed during operation No failover n/a n/a Each unit marks the failover
interface as failed. You should
restore the failover link as soon as
possible because the unit cannot fail
over to the standby unit while the
failover link is down.
Table63-2 Failover Behavior for Active/Active Failover (continued)
Failure Event Policy
Active Group
Action
Standby Group
Action Notes
Model License Requirement
ASA 5505 No support.
ASA 5510,
ASA 5512-X
Security Plus License.
All other models Base License.