The system failover is switching to a passive system when an active system is in a state of failure(e.g. hardware fault, network problem).

A passive system synchronizes all data from the master database in which is running in an active system by the Database Replication[1] and monitors the active system. A passive system sends a heartbeat about every 10 seconds to monitor an active system. If the passive does not receive the response from an active system for the Deadtime, the passive system switches the mode to "active".

Failover Flow

You can connect the management page without changing the URI because a virtual IP is automatically configured in the active system by the failover service.

All services in the active and passive devices work as shown in the table below.

Service Active System Passive System
dhcpv4 running running
dhcpv6 running running
radius running running
logexp running running but only saves its Syslog.
failover Configuring a Virtual IP Monitoring a active system and replicating the database
Database Master Slave

Note that, If an active system is recovered from a fault after another system has switched to the active mode, the recovered system switches to passive mode. In other words, The failback[2] does not occur.

You can configure the System Failover via the CLI.

References