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About high availability

You can deploy two identical Sophos Firewall devices in a high availability (HA) cluster in active-passive or active-active modes.

You can configure HA in hardware, virtual, and software appliances. You can also manage an HA cluster from Sophos Central.

HA provides failover in both modes and load-balancing in active-active mode, offering redundancy and preventing a single point of failure. This enables you to minimize downtime and disruption to your network.

Platforms and requirements

You can configure HA on firewalls using the following platforms:

  • Hardware appliances, including the XGS and XG Series firewalls
  • Virtual platforms, such as Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware, and Nutanix Prism. See Cloud, virtual, and software appliances.
  • Software on custom hardware

HA modes

Active-passive HA delivers redundancy and minimizes downtime. Active-active HA delivers higher throughput and redundancy.

Deploy and centrally manage

You can connect HA devices to access-layer switches, such as Sophos Switches, in your network. See Configure access layer switches for XGS HA.

You can centrally manage Sophos Firewall devices and Sophos Switches from Sophos Central.