You can cluster up to 6 Expressway appliances and virtual machines to increase capacity and provide redundancy, 4 servers are active-active, the remaining 2 are passive and will only become active if needed.
With a cluster of two, all peers will be active at the same time. It's only when you have a cluster of five or six that the extra peers will be passive. You can achieve a hot-standby though, simply put the second server into maintenance mode, but will require someone to bring it out of maintenance mode when it's needed and because of this delay the failover of services.
Another option to achieve active-passive with just two peers is to use SRV records, set one with a higher priority over the other.
It's not difficult to setup a VCS cluster, recommend you take a look at the VCS Cluster Creation and Maintenance Deployment Guides. Pros to a cluster is you get increased capacity and redundancy in case of failure. The biggest con of not running a cluster is in the case of failure, you won't be able to make any calls until the server is restored.
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