FortiGate
FortiGate Next Generation Firewall utilizes purpose-built security processors and threat intelligence security services from FortiGuard labs to deliver top-rated protection and high performance, including encrypted traffic.
gmanea
Staff
Staff
Article Id 196182
Description
FortiGate Session Life Support Protocol (FGSP) was introduced in FortiOS 5.0. In previous versions of FortiOS this feature was known as “standalone session sync” and only supported TCP sessions, it did not support asymmetric traffic and had other deployment limitations. FGSP was designed to overcome these limitations. It supports asymmetric traffic, TCP, UDP, ICMP sessions as well as NAT sessions. FGSP also supports configuration synchronization between FortiGates.

In order for session synchronization and standalone config synchronization to work correctly the heartbeat interface must be specified.

Solution
By default two interfaces are configured to be heartbeat interfaces and the priority for both these interfaces is set to 50.

So, after configuring session sync / configuration sync, the administrator must check if those interfaces are connected to the other unit and also configured on the peer in "config system ha".

But if the default values were modified in time and the heartbeat devices were removed from the configuration,  the interfaces must be added back in order to have working FGSP.

Standalone configuration synchronization uses a very similar process as FortiGate Clustering Protocol (FGCP). There is a master/backup relationship between the two FortiGates similar to FGCP but only of configuration synchronization not session information. The master is selected by using priority/override. The heartbeat is used to check the master's health and once heartbeat loss detected, a new master is selected.

So, based on the above notes, the following settings should be added in "config system ha":

config system ha
set standalone-config-sync enable
set session-pickup enable
set session-pickup-connectionless {enable | disable}
set session-pickup-expectation {enable | disable}
set session-pickup-nat {enable | disable}
set hbdev []...
set priority [0 - 255]
set override enable/disable
end

Related Articles

Configuration Guide: FortiGate Session Life Support Protocol (FGSP)

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