Question

Cisco ASA 5505 Dual ISP and Failover

Asked by: DataDudes

Hi,

We currently have two ASA 5505's on separate ISP's.  One is a slower line meant for e-mail only traffic and the other is a high-bandwidth line for outbound internet access.  If the high bandwidth line goes down, we would like the internet access to automatically go out of the second slower line until the faster line comes back up.  How would we go about doing this?  Do we need a security plus license and failover on each 5505 to do this?  Or would something like dual ISP capability work?  What licenses would need to be purchased to do this?  Currently we are using a base license with unlimited inside hosts.

Thank you

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Asked On
2008-04-23 at 15:50:30ID23348618
Topics

Cisco PIX Firewall

,

Enterprise Firewalls

,

Networking Hardware Firewalls

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
4

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Answers

 

by: harbor235Posted on 2008-04-23 at 19:11:18ID: 21427258


Ideally, you should have routers that can BGP peer with your upstream providers. ASA can do EIGRP, OSPF, and RIP.
I doubt any service provider will run an IGP with you. The only thing left would be static routing which will not give
you the dynamic properties you need.

You need routers.


harbor235 ;}

 

by: DataDudesPosted on 2008-04-23 at 21:55:31ID: 21427840

so what do the Dual ISP and Failover features do then?

 

by: harbor235Posted on 2008-04-24 at 06:38:10ID: 21430660


The dual isp feature is like a SAA probbe, you pick a monitoring point upstream and bind it to a static route, if the monitoring point becomes unavailable the route is withdrawn. You can setup a backup route as well. So, its not that you cannot use it this way however there are certain failure scenarios where this does not work optimally. If the limitations are acceptable then I agree give it a whirl.

here is a good config for DUAL ISP:

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/110/pix-dual-isp.pdf

Failover is failover, the is active active and active standby. Each provides services for site high availabiity is case one FW is lost. However, you have asa 5505s which only supports stateless
activce standby.

The best approach would be two routers in front doing BGP with your provider, FWs at the edge using
HA and static routing will work, it just depends on how important HA is to you and what your comfort level is.

harbor235 ;}

harbor235 ;}

 

by: shirkanPosted on 2008-07-28 at 10:33:11ID: 22105113

DUAL ISP and Failover are 2 different things - the Failover is only for Hardware failover, meaning 1 ASA breaks, the other will take over (in simple terms) but for that you really want a 5510 or up. Of course that will also happen if your ISP router goes down and the outside interface goes down with it, if its a monitored interface.

Second, the Dual ISP IS a connection failover. If one connection goes down (the ASA pings a host somewhere that is preferable highly unlikely to stop responding, like a hop from the ISP)  
the ASA will change the route to your second connection. i am not sure if that will work with 2 Dial Up connections, but it works with a T1 and a Dial up as backup.

The ISP failover will only work if its about outgoing traffic. It will NOT work if you have servers that need to be reachable from the internet. For that you need BGP as harbor mentioned before....

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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