In FortiGate active-passive HA, the FortiGate Clustering Protocol (FGCP) provides failover protection. This means that an active-passive cluster can provide FortiGate services even when one of the cluster units encounters a problem that would result in complete loss of connectivity for a stand-aloneFortiGate unit. This failover protection provides a backup mechanism that can be used to reduce the risk of unexpected downtime, especially in a mission-critical environment.

The FGCP supports three kinds of failover protection. Device failover automatically replaces a failed device and restarts traffic flow with minimal impact on the network. Link failover maintains traffic flow if a link fails. Session failover resumes communication sessions with minimal loss of data if a device or link failover occurs.

This chapter describes how FGCP failover protection works and provides detailed NAT/Route and Transparent mode packet flow descriptions.

This chapter contains the following sections: