Stretched HA Firewall

Cisco supports a stretched Active-Standby firewall system if:

• ACI operates in layer 2,
• the firewall operates as the IP default gateway for the endpoints or the firewall operates in Transparent mode or the active and standby nodes are connected with an L3Out.

Independent HA Firewalls

If I have to deploy Active-Standby Firewalls, Cisco recommends to deploy them as independent HA firewalls in the ACI sites (i.e. not across the intersite link)

One concrete device per firewall –> 2 concrete devices under the L4-7 device.

If I have a two-arm firewall design: For all Concrete Devices within a L4-7 Device I must map all Concrete Interfaces of the same direction to the Cluster Interfaces ( #PersoNote symmetrical interface mapping):

• add one Cluster Interface for the Consumer side and associate it with all Consumer-side interfaces of all [[#Concrete Device]]s,
• add one Cluster Interface for the Provider side and associate it with all Provider-side interfaces of all [[#Concrete Device]]s.

If I have a one-arm firewall design: add one Cluster Interface that includes both Concrete Interfaces of the firewalls. #verifyThis

Failover traffic is not managed by L4-7 Service Graphs

See the document ACI Service Graph Design Guide for ACI 5.2 and Later.pdf, page=50.

With the ‘out-of-band’ method

Use the dedicated firewall failover link ports and firewall stateful failover link ports, or designate some ports for that role; Failover traffic and stateful failover traffic are said to be managed ‘out-of-band’

With the ‘in-band’ method

i.e. use the physical network of the data traffic for failover and stateful failover traffic too. When the firewall is attached to ACI, the physical network path of firewall traffic is the ACI fabric.