Chapter 9 High Availability for FortiOS 5.0 : HA with FortiGate-VM and third-party products : Troubleshooting layer-2 switches : Forwarding delay on layer 2 switches
  
Forwarding delay on layer 2 switches
You must ensure that if there is a switch between the FortiGate HA cluster and the network its is protecting and the switch has a forwarding delay (even if spanning tree is disabled) when one of its interfaces is activated then the forwarding delay should be set as low as possible. For example, some versions of Cisco IOS have a forwarding delay of 15 seconds even when spanning tree is disabled. If left at this default value then TCP session pickup can fail because traffic is not forwarded through the switch on HA failover.