New to the forum! Based on the what we saw in the Lawrence videos we purchased an identical pair of the Netgate XG-7100 1U via Amazon Canada. However here are not the HA, but rather to individual switches. These will go into a data centre where we have 2 ports from the same bandwidth supplier. We want high-availability. This page suggests we need to purchase some sort of additional expansion card?
High Availability – Netgate. In order to provide failover of the Network Interface Cards, a fully discrete NIC must be installed in both devices. They may be purchased here.
https://shop.netgate.com/collections/expansion-cards/products/7100-quad-port-adapter-card-with-pcie-installation-kit
We wrote to NetGate sales and received a very quick personal informative reply.
I would’ve thought this had been covered in the NetGate 7100 / psSense HA videos? Or perhaps we can use one of the existing ports on the NetGate 7100?
You can can setup HA using the existing ports. Here is my video on getting HA setup.
Thanks Tom! The user manual agrees it is possible but suggests there is a limitation
“Switched Ethernet ports can be used for High Availability (HA), but there is one limitation when configuring switch ports for HA. Because the uplinks from the switch to the SoC are always up, failover is only effective in scenarios where a system completely dies. If a single switch interface goes down, CARP will not be able to detect this properly so the PRIMARY will remain PRIMARY on any switch interfaces that drop link. The SECONDARY will also consider itself PRIMARY of the network associated to the switch link that dropped. In this situation, LAN clients will likely go through the SECONDARY but will not be able to get online if NAT is utilized with a WAN CARP IP. It’s possible to NAT to the WAN interface IP to get around this but it can cause state issues during failover. For best results, use the ports on a Network Interface expansion card. When configured correctly, the discrete ports of the add-in NIC will provide full redundancy and failover in the event of a network outage or scheduled maintenance.”
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