FWSM failover not working

[apanesar]

Hello,

I have a pair of FWSM they are running version 2.2(1) and they are currently in the same 6509 chassis although i intend to locate them in seperate chassis in the future. They are running in multiple context mode. I am trying to get them to do Failover and Stateful FO for which I have entered configuration in the system context. I have allocated vlans to both firewalls for this purpose, and the config of the standby firewall for FO is as follows:

failover

failover lan unit secondary

failover lan interface FWSMFAILOVER vlan 990

failover polltime unit 1 holdtime 15

failover polltime interface 15

failover interface-policy 50%

failover interface ip FWSMFAILOVER 11.0.0.9 255.255.255.0 standby 11.0.0.10

arp timeout 14400

the error message i receive is

No response from mate.

However you can ping both firewalls over the failover vlan and the arp caches are populated correctly.

Can you please advise as to why they are not syncing up.

The only difference between them is that the primary has 20 context license, and the standby has 2 context. But I am only using the system, admin and 1 other context currently.

[pringlem]

When I purchased my FWSM failover pair, I was told that the number of context licenses must match on both units for failover to function, regardless of how many contexts are actually configured.

Hope that helps!

[eugene.beckett]

they must be matched - including licensing - do this at the root (sys)

sh fail hist

this should give you a clue