HP VPN Firewall Appliances High Availability Configuration Guide

Configuring a collaboration group

Overview

You can add ports on a device to one group called "collaboration group." All ports in the group have

consistent state. They are either able or unable to forward packets at the same time. Collaboration group

is mainly used to trigger the downlink port state based on the uplink port state, and implement fast link

switchover.

As shown in Figure 43, L

AN users Host A, Host B and Host C access the Internet through Device B. When

the interfa

ce on Device B connecting Device A goes down, the traffic switches from Device B to the

standby device Device C because dynamic routing is enabled in the network. However, because the link

connecting Device B and the LAN is still up, the time required for dynamic route update is long and the

traffic switchover is slow, which greatly affect the LAN users' access to the Internet.

Figure 43 Network diagram

After you assign Device B's ports connecting Device A and the LAN to a collaboration group, the

following happens:

• When the physical state of any port in the collaboration group is down, the other ports in the

collaboration group are set to the linkgroup-down state, and cannot exchange traffic with the peers.

The collaboration group is in down state.

• When the port that was physically down goes up, the system tries to bring up the other ports in the

collaboration group. If they go up in ten seconds, the collaboration group goes up; if any port fails

to go up, all the other ports are set to the linkgroup-down state. The collaboration group is in down

state.