Setting up failover mode on to ASA 5510's

[Andy White]

Hello,

I've been giventeh task of adding a second ASA 5510 to a live ASA and making sure that the active/standby failover works, has anyone done this, do I need a crossover cable? I wondered if there is a simple guide you may know of?

Thanks

[rizwanr74]

"do I need a crossover cable?" Yes you can use a crossover cable.

Here is a link, might help you all the way.

http://www.cisco.com/image/gif/paws/77809/pixfailover.pdf

thanks

[mvsheik123]

Hi Andy,

Per Rizwan's suggestion, you need xover cable or place a small (managed is better) switch and use straight thru cables. It also makes the troubleshoot part easy incase of any failover happens.

Thx

MS

[rizwanr74]

"place a small (managed is better) switch and use straight thru cables"

Placing an extra switch creates another single point of failure into the equation.

I deployed countless failover firewalls with a cross cable and runs just fine.

Thanks

[Marvin Rhoads]

A regular Ethernet Cat 5 jumper will work as well, with or without an intervening switch.

Follow the configuration guidelines in Cisco's documentation for your version of ASA software:

Configuration Guides

High Availability Instructions for ASA 8.4 (command line interface)

If you're relatively new to ASA, you can use the wizard in ASDM. See this link, for example.