Configuring Cisco ASA active standby failover
Overview
In modern datacenters one of the most important things that needs to be addressed is uptime. Cisco ASA offers high availability mechanisms like failover in order to provide network uptime and redundancy. In order to configure failover we need two identical ASA devices connected to each other through a dedicated failover link and, optionally, a stateful failover link. There are two different failover modes that are supported on the ASA platform: active/standby and active/active. In this article we will focus only on configuring active/standby failover. In an active/standby failover setup only one unit called the active unit is passing traffic. The standby unit is used as a backup of the active unit and only accepts management connections (all transit traffic is dropped). When the active unit fails, it changes to the standby state while the standby unit changes to the active state.
