Sophos Firewall v19.5 high availability enhancements
Credit to Author: Chris McCormack| Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2022 15:05:10 +0000
In this ongoing series of articles about the great new features in SFOS v19.5, we’ve covered new search capabilities, SD-WAN load balancing, Xstream TLS FastPath, Azure AD integration, and now this week, high availability enhancements.
Sophos Firewall high availability
Sophos Firewall supports high availability (HA) clustering of two appliances in active-active or active-passive operation for higher performance and redundancy.
SFOS v18 introduced a major new enhancement to high availability with QuickHA setup that makes configuration almost a plug-and-play exercise.
If you’re not familiar with the various HA modes or how to use QuickHA, check out the great two-part video series on these topics.
What’s new with high availability in v19.5
Making management easier
Several user interface enhancements improve the status and visibility of your high-availability cluster with a new control center widget, enhanced status panel, and new node names for easy device identification.
Node Names help identify the particular device in the cluster and are shown on the browser tab, HA status page, HA logs, command line interface, and Control Center to make it very easy to know which device you are currently interacting with.
Redundant HA links
High availability pairs can now be synchronized with redundant HA links to add resiliency and prevent split-brain conditioning.
Up to four links can be provisioned for HA pairs using physical, LAG, VLAN or unbound interfaces. Conveniently, LAG configuration happens automatically behind the scenes in QuickHA mode.
Check out this video for a full demonstration of all the great new HA enhancements in SFOS v19.5
Check out all the new features in v19.5
Sophos Firewall OS v19.5 includes a ton of great new capabilities. Check out the full list of what’s new in this What’s New PDF download.
SFOS v19.5 early access
Check out all the great new features in SFOS v19.5 today and help us make this release the best it can be by participating in the early access program. Visit the SFOS v19.5 EAP registration page to get started.
Sophos Firewall OS v19.5 EAP1 is a fully supported upgrade from any v18.5 firmware as well as v19, including the very recent v19 MR1 build 365 release.
Once you’re up and running, please provide feedback through your Sophos Firewall’s feedback mechanism (top right of every screen on your Firewall). Also visit our EAP community forums to share your experiences with others.