Promoting Secondary/Active to Primary/Active

[Jeremy Buck]

Hello,

I've currently got a single firewall running as Secondary/Active. The Primary firewall is offline. Here is my question:

If I change the Secondary/Active firewall to Primary/Active will it do any of the following:

1) Create a fail over event?

2) Will the MAC associated to primary IP change?

Just some additional info the firewall was brought up alone. It appears to be using the Burned-In-MAC-Address of itself for the primary IP. As I understand it, promoting it to Primary should not yeild any MAC change but I'm not certain. The only Cisco Documentation on the net speaks to only the issue of the primary coming back online while the secondary is using its own MAC--in that case it causes a MAC change and interrupts traffic.

Thanks,

Jeremy

[vikram_anumukonda]

the mac-addres assosciated with the active ip-address will change ( as BIA address is used) when the failover event occurs and will cause traffic interrruption

instead, you can use the mac-address command in interface configuration mode to specify virtual-mac-address for active/standby units, in which case the mac-address assosciated with the active ip-address will always remain the same doesn't matter which device is active.

HTH

Vikram