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 Fusion (previously 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: XGS 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 Fusion.