HP VPN Firewall Appliances High Availability Configuration Guide

2
MTTR = fault detection time + hardware replacement time + system initialization time + link recovery time
+ routing time + forwarding recovery time. A smaller value of each item means a smaller MTTR and a
higher availability.
High availability technologies
Increasing MTBF or decreasing MTTR can enhance the availability of a network. The high availability
technologies described in this section meet the level 2 and level 3 high availability requirements in the
aspect of decreasing MTTR.
High availability technologies can be classified as fault detection technologies or protection switchover
technologies.
Fault detection technologies
Fault detection technologies enable detection and diagnosis of network faults:
• BFD is a generic fault detection technology that can be used at any layer.
• NQA is used for diagnosis and evaluation of network quality.
• Collaboration group is used to implement fast link switchover based on correlated interface states.
• Track works along with other high availability technologies to detect faults through a collaboration
mechanism.
Table 2 Fault detection technologies
Technolo
gy
Introduction Reference
BFD
BFD provides a single mechanism to quickly detect and monitor the
connectivity of links or IP forwarding in networks. To improve network
performance, devices must quickly detect communication failures to
restore communication through backup paths as soon as possible.
"Configuring BFD"
NQA
NQA analyzes network performance, services and service quality
through sending test packets, and provides you with network
performance and service quality parameters such as jitter, TCP
connection delay, FTP connection delay and file transfer rate.
"Configuring
NQA"
Collaboration
group
A collaboration group is a group of ports that change their state to up
or down in a synchronized way. For example, if one port in the group
goes down, all the other ports go down to stop forwarding traffic.
This feature enables the ports on a traffic path to adapt their up/down
state to each other for fast link switchover.
"Configuring a
collaboration
group"
Track
The Track module implements collaboration between different
modules. The collaboration involves three sets of modules:
application, Track, and detection. These modules collaborate with
one another through collaboration entries. The detection modules
trigger the application modules to perform certain operations through
the Track module. The detection modules probe such items as link
status and network performance, and inform the application modules
of the detection result through the Track module. Once notified of
network status changes, the application modules use the changes to
avoid communication interruption and network performance
degradation.
"Configuring
Track"