Automatic Failover for Advertised Networks
Automatic failover ensures continuous connectivity by enabling a secondary router to automatically take over forwarding traffic to advertised networks when the primary router becomes unavailable. This capability strengthens network resilience, minimizes downtime, and maintains consistent routing behavior in redundant router deployments.
Figure 1. Advertised Networks & Failover Priority
In modern distributed and hybrid environments, even brief connectivity disruptions can negatively impact user experience, business operations, and secure inter-site communication. Automatic failover addresses these challenges by eliminating single points of failure and ensuring uninterrupted access to advertised networks without requiring manual intervention.
By leveraging failover, redundant router pairs operate as a unified, fault-tolerant system that automatically adapts to failures and preserves stable network connectivity.
How Automatic Failover Works on Zenarmor Secure Private Networks
Automatic failover functions as an integrated high-availability mechanism within Zenarmor’s secure private network. Rather than focusing solely on a failover event, the system provides end-to-end resilience through continuous monitoring, intelligent priority handling, and seamless traffic redirection.
Multiple gateways (peers) participate in the same private network and advertise identical network prefixes. Under normal conditions, the gateway with the highest priority actively forwards traffic, while secondary gateways remain available as standby peers.
Zenarmor continuously monitors the health and reachability of the primary gateway. If the primary gateway becomes unavailable due to connectivity loss, hardware failure, or service interruption, failover logic is immediately triggered. Traffic is automatically rerouted to the next available gateway based on the configured failover priority, without requiring configuration changes or administrator action.
Once the primary gateway is restored, routing behavior can automatically revert according to defined priority rules, ensuring a predictable and stable recovery process.
Why Automatic Failover Is Important
Automatic failover provides several key advantages for modern network deployments:
- Improved Network Resilience: Maintains access to advertised networks even during gateway outages.
- Zero Manual Intervention: Eliminates the need for scripts or operational intervention during failures.
- Consistent Routing Behavior: Ensures predictable traffic flow during failover and recovery.
- Centralized Visibility: Failover behavior and gateway health are easily monitored through Zenconsole.
Automatic failover for advertised networks can be configured directly from the Zenconsole interface. By assigning routing priorities to redundant routers, Zenarmor ensures that traffic is always forwarded through the most appropriate gateway, even during failures.
To learn how to advertise networks on gateway peers, assign failover priorities, and manage failover behavior step by step, see: Managing Advertised Networks & Failover Priority on Gateway Peers