Full mesh high availability

Earlier in the chapter we talked about the link aggregation and 802.3ad protocol. As we said, the mentioned solutions expand redundancy and high availability also to the hardware devices connecting the FortiGate units to the rest of the network (usually network switches). The required configuration is called Full Mesh HA. The FortiGate cluster will be connected to the network using redundant connections and switches. In the following diagram, we can see a cluster made up of two units (FortiGateA and FortiGateB) connected with a full mesh to the internal network:

All the connections are redundant, including two interfaces dedicated to the cluster heartbeat. We will use two switches to have the highest level of continuity. Cluster configuration will follow the same steps we have seen when we were talking about FGCP (or FGSP), while the redundant links will be configured using the steps explained earlier in the chapter for the link aggregation.