Affect on FTD traffic during Firepower Management Center restart

[rgnelson]

We're running a pair of ASA5516's with FTD in a failover pair, in transparent mode. The whole config was pressed into service very quickly..... but is working well. We have to restart the Management Center but we made no notes as to what happens to traffic while Management center is restarting. I've gone through the docs and its jut not clear. 

Will traffic continue to flow on FTD while the management center restarts? Or is this the kind of question that depends on many configuration settings? 

[vaibhav.parlekar1]

I think your firewall should continue working with the last deployed policies by the FMC. the reboot of the FMC should not impact the traffic flowing through the firewall.

Vaibhav

[Marvin Rhoads · Accepted solution]

Generally speaking the impact is negligible. Any managed devices stay online and continue to enforce the current policy deployed to them.

Some URL lookups or File (AMP) checks may be affected if you are using those features. IPS features should not be affected except of course no Security Intelligence updates will be available until the FMC restart completes.

[rgnelson]

Thank you both for the sanity check, exactly what I was looking for!

[a.mechoulam]

Hi, let go a little further on the question:

If the deployment implies AD integration (Realms) PxGrid with ISE and microsegmentation, some rules chequeing AD groups, other checking source SGT. I asume that the responsable of collecting, manteining and distributing all this info to the sensors is the FMC.

So, if the FMC is not available any of these rules would work? 

Thanks.

[Rob Ingram]

@a.mechoulam bindings are sent from ISE to the FMC, which in turn sends them to the FTD. If the FMC is offline during a restart, no new IP/SGT bindings will be learnt by the FTD, however the FTD will store the existing bindings for a period (from memory 24 hours) - therefore the rules should continue to work.

[a.mechoulam]

Hi Rob, excellent!!!!!

Thank you very much!!!!