Technical Brief: Implementing Failover Services

Implementing Failover Services

Why Implement Failover Services?
Today’s networks require virtually no operational downtime for every device. To guarantee continuity of service, a fail
over mechanism is required. The Blue Coat ProxySG™ offers the capability to implement a redundant configuration
of Blue Coat secure proxy appliances. Fail over allows a secondary ProxySG appliance to take over if a fist appliance
fails, providing redundancy to the network through a master/client relationship.

How to Install Failover Services on the ProxySG

There are two steps to implement fail over services:

1 Create a fail over address

2 Define the group settings

Step 1 – Create a fail over address

To create a Failover address, use the Blue Coat GUI Management Console, select the Network option, Advanced,
then select the Failover tab.

Click on New and type the failover address that will be shared by both the ProxySG appliances. You can use a
physical address of one of the ProxySG appliances if you like. In this case the appliance with the physical address will
be known as the master.
 Technical Brief: Implementing Failover Services

Note: you will need to perform this operation on both the ProxySG appliances

Step 2 – Define the group settings

Enable group settings and define a multicast address (e.g. 224.0.0.1). Additional parameters can also be configured
such as the advertisement interval, priority, and so on.

Click OK and click on Apply.

 Technical Brief: Implementing Failover Services

Note: you will need to perform this operation on both the ProxySG appliances

Monitoring Failover Services

To monitor fail over services, via the Blue Coat Management Console, Select Statistics, and the Failover option. You
can then view the state of the appliance for the defined Failover Service.

Conclusion
The Blue Coat ProxySG provides hardware redundancy for continuous uptime. The Blue Coat Management Console
provides the ability to define and monitor a failover service for your secure proxy appliances.

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