BGP Process During HA (Active-Standby) Failover

[KenjiKang]

Hi,

I operate two FortiGate 120G devices in an Active-Standby HA configuration with a BGP connection.
When an Active-Standby failover occurs, there is a  BGP interruption of approximately 30 seconds.

The following KB article states that the BGP process only runs on the daemon process of the active unit, and that a new process is launched upon failover.
Could you please provide detailed documentation or evidence regarding this point?

KB
https://community.fortinet.com/t5/FortiGate/Technical-Tip-Configuring-FortiGate-HA-and-BGP-graceful-...
On a FortiGate HA cluster, the BGP router daemon process is only running on the Primary unit. When there is an HA failover a new BGP process will be launched on the newly elected primary.

Additionally, I observed a outage of 25-30 seconds during failover.
I understand this is not related to the BGP keepalive timer (30 seconds) but is simply the time required for the BGP process to launch and establish a connection on the new primary unit.
I would appreciate it if you could point out any misunderstandings regarding this point.

Hardware: FortiGate 120G
OS: v7.4.8 build2795

Thank you
Kenji

[BillH_FTNT]

Hi @KenjiKang 

Could you please share your BGP configuration ?

Bill

[KenjiKang]

Thank you for your feedback.

It's difficult for me to share the config as is, so I'll share a version with some parts masked.
If you'd like to request the unmasked config, I can provide the parts that are possible to share.

config router bgp
set as XXX
set router-id XX.XX.XX.XX
set keepalive-timer 30
set holdtime-timer 90
set dampening enable
config neighbor
edit "XX.XX.XX.XX"
set soft-reconfiguration enable
set remote-as XXX
set route-map-in "Rmap-in"
set route-map-out "Rmap-out"
set keep-alive-timer 30
set holdtime-timer 90
next

Thank you
Kenji

[KenjiKang]

Thank you all for your kind advice.

I believe my hypothesis is correct, any feedback or comments from those with similar experience or knowledge would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you
Kenji