HA licensing

sdeyoung

Hello all, I have a question about how the HA licensing works. I have quite a few old SonicWalls TZ215's and they are/were setup as HA way back when they were initially installed. I was not the one who set them up, I've taken over for a company and have inherited all of this. When I look at the licensing for their products it doesn't show any active HA licensing. So my question is, how is this still working if the licensing is not valid? I have tested failover and it still functions. Is HA licensing a one-time purchase or must it be renewed every year? Perhaps it's only required to setup/configure for the first time?

SonicAdmin80

Basic HA is built-in to the products. You only need to have the devices associated in mysonicwall and it works. Stateful HA is an add-on one-time purchase but HA works without it too, stateful just gives a more seamless experience.

preston

Hi @sdeyoung, All SonicWAll appliances apart from old SoHos come with the option to enable HA free without any other license, with the NSA and some of the high end TZ range appliances apart from Wireless models. you can purchase a secondary appliance as a HA appliance at a reduced cost and share the licenses from the primary one,

for devices like the TZ215 they would have purchased a secondary base appliance (with no Security services on) and enabled HA on the primary, then paired these devices in MysonicWall to sync the licenses.

the only licenses ever needed for HA is for the Stateful HA or in situations on Gen 5/6 (NSA5500 upwards) where you can have Active/Active DPI (no longer supported on Gen7) which requires the primary appliance to have the expanded license

sdeyoung

https://community.sonicwall.com/technology-and-support/discussion/comment/13833#Comment_13833

Ah ok, this makes sense then. I was starting to think that this was the case. Thanks for confirming this!

sdeyoung

https://community.sonicwall.com/technology-and-support/discussion/comment/13835#Comment_13835

That makes sense. Thank you!