Preparing Your Equipment for Chassis Cluster Formation

Use Feature Explorer to confirm platform and release support for specific features.

Review the Platform-Specific Chassis Cluster Formation Behavior section for notes related to your platform.

To form a chassis cluster, a pair of the same kind of supported SRX Series Firewalls is combined to act as a single system that enforces the same overall security. SRX Series Firewalls must meet the following requirements to be included in a chassis clusters.

To form a chassis cluster, a pair of the same kind of supported SRX Series Firewalls is combined to act as a single system that enforces the same overall security.

• The network node redundancy is achieved by grouping a pair of the same kind of supported SRX Series Firewalls into a cluster.

• SRX Series Firewalls must be the same model.

• Junos OS requirements: Both the devices must be running the same Junos OS version

• Licensing requirements: Licenses are unique to each device and cannot be shared between the devices. Both devices (which are going to form chassis cluster) must have the identical features and license keys enabled or installed them. If both devices do not have an identical set of licenses, then after a failover, that particular licensed feature might not work or the configuration might not synchronize in chassis cluster formation.

• All services processing cards (SPCs), network processing cards (NPCs), and input/output cards (IOCs) on applicable SRX Series Firewalls must have the same slot placement and must be of same type. Example:

  You can use the show chassis hardware command to identify the type of the card.

  Following example shows the placement and the type of cards used in a chassis cluster setup:

• The control ports on the respective nodes are connected to form a control plane that synchronizes the configuration and kernel state to facilitate the high availability of interfaces and services.

• The data plane on the respective nodes is connected over the fabric ports to form a unified data plane. The fabric link allows for the management of cross-node flow processing and for the management of session redundancy.