IPsec Gateway Failover and Redundancy - Problem Statement and Goals

Recovering from failure of IPsec gateways maintaining large numbers of SAs may take several minutes, if they need to re-establish the IPsec SAs by re-running the key management protocol, IKEv2. A similar problem arises in the event of a network outage resulting in the failure of several gateways and servers. The latency involved in this approach is significant, leading to a need for a faster and yet secure failover solution. This document describes the problem statement and the goals for an IPsec/IKEv2 gateway failover/ redundancy solution.