Failover Monitoring
The failover feature in the Cisco Security Appliance monitors failover communication, the
power status of the other unit, and hello packets received at each interface. If two consecutive
hello packets are not received within an amount of time determined by the failover feature,
failover starts testing the interfaces to determine which unit has failed and transfers active
control to the standby unit. At this point, the “active” LED on the front of the standby
Security Appliance lights up and the “active” LED on the failed Security Appliance unit dims.
NOTE The ASA 55x0 Security Appliance family of firewalls does not support the serial
cable for failover.
NOTE The failover poll seconds command enables you to determine how long failover
waits before sending special failover hello packets between the primary and standby units
over all network interfaces and the failover cable. The default is 15 seconds. The minimum
value is 3 seconds, and the maximum is 15 seconds.