Configure Interfaces

Configure data interfaces as Spanned EtherChannels.

Procedure


Step 1

Choose Devices > Device Management, and click Edit (edit icon) next to the cluster.

Step 2

Click Interfaces.

Step 3

Configure Spanned EtherChannel data interfaces.

  1. Configure one or more EtherChannels. See Configure an EtherChannel.

    You can include one or more member interfaces in the EtherChannel. Because this EtherChannel is spanned across all of the nodes, you only need one member interface per node; however, for greater throughput and redundancy, multiple members are recommended.

  2. (Optional) For regular firewall interfaces, configure VLAN subinterfaces on the EtherChannel. The rest of this procedure applies to the subinterfaces. See Add a Subinterface.

  3. Click Edit (edit icon) for the EtherChannel interface.

  4. Configure the name and other parameters. For regular firewall interfaces, see Configure Routed Mode Interfaces or, for transparent mode, Configure Bridge Group Interfaces. For IPS-only interfaces, see Inline Sets and Passive Interfaces.

    • If the cluster control link interface MTU is not at least 100 bytes higher than the data interface MTU, you will see an error that you must reduce the MTU of the data interface. By default, the cluster control link MTU is 1600 bytes. If you want to increase the MTU of data interfaces, first increase the cluster control link MTU. Note that we do not recommend setting the cluster control link MTU between 2561 and 8362; due to block pool handling, this MTU size is not optimal for system operation.

    • For routed mode, DHCP, PPPoE, IPv6 autoconfig and manual link-local addresses are not supported. For point-to-point connections, you can specify a 31-bit subnet mask (255.255.255.254). In this case, no IP addresses are reserved for the network or broadcast addresses.

  5. Set a manual global MAC address for the EtherChannel. Click Advanced, and in the Active Mac Address field, enter a MAC address in H.H.H format, where H is a 16-bit hexadecimal digit.

    For example, the MAC address 00-0C-F1-42-4C-DE would be entered as 000C.F142.4CDE. The MAC address must not have the multicast bit set, that is, the second hexadecimal digit from the left cannot be an odd number.

    Do not set the Standby Mac Address; it is ignored.

    You must configure a MAC address for a Spanned EtherChannel to avoid potential network connectivity problems. With a manually-configured MAC address, the MAC address stays with the current control unit. If you do not configure a MAC address, then if the control unit changes, the new control unit uses a new MAC address for the interface, which can cause a temporary network outage.

  6. Click OK. Repeat the above steps for other data interfaces.

Step 4

Click Save.

You can now go to Deploy > Deployment and deploy the policy to assigned devices. The changes are not active until you deploy them.