When the system detects a failure in an Express Connect circuit, the system performs a failover within a few seconds. To accelerate failovers, you can add virtual border routers (VBRs) to a failover group. After the system detects failures on a VBR by using Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BDF), the system can seamlessly switch workloads to the standby VBR in the failover group within less than one second.

Limits

  • Before you use this feature, Submit a ticket to acquire the required permissions.
  • You can add only VBRs that have BFD enabled to failover groups.
  • Each failover group can contain only two VBRs and each VBR can be added to only one failover group.
  • The VBRs in a failover group must be deployed in the same region and attached to the same Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) instance.
  • The BGP peer groups of the VBRs in a failover group must use the same Autonomous System (AS) number.
  • You need to configure the VBRs in a failover group as active and standby VBRs and configure load balancing for the VBRs.

Prerequisites

Create a failover group

  1. Log on to the Express Connect console.
  2. In the top navigation bar, select a region and then click Virtual Border Routers (VBRs) in the left-side navigation pane.
  3. On the Virtual Border Routers (VBRs) page, click the ID of the VBR that you want to manage.
  4. On the VBR details page, click the Failover Groups tab, and click Configure Backup Next Hop.
  5. In the Configure Backup Next Hop dialog box, set the following parameters and click OK:
    ParameterDescription
    CENThe system automatically displays the CEN instance to which the VBR is attached.

    If the VBR is not attached to a CEN instance, click Attach Now to attach the VBR to a CEN instance.

    RegionThe system automatically displays the region where the VBR is deployed.
    Failover Group NameEnter a name for the failover group.

    The value must be 2 to 128 characters in length, and can contain letters, digits, underscores (_), and hyphens (-). It must start with a letter but cannot start with http:// or https://.

    DescriptionEnter a description for the failover group.
    Standby VBRSelect a standby VBR from the drop-down list.

    The system automatically lists all VBRs that are deployed in the same region, attached to the same CEN instance, and have BFD enabled.

    After you complete the preceding steps, the status of the failover group changes to Normal.

    Note You cannot modify the configuration of a failover group after the failover group is created. If the configuration of a failover group does not meet your business requirements, click Delete in the Actions column to delete the failover group. Then, create another failover group that meets your business requirements.

Test the failover group

After you complete the preceding steps, you can perform the following operations to test the failover group:

  1. Log on to an Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance. For more information, see Connection methods.
  2. Run the ping command on the ECS instance to check the connectivity between the ECS instance and your data center.
    If you can receive echo reply packets, it indicates that the connection is established.
  3. Disconnect the active VBR from the data center.
  4. Run the ping command again on the ECS instance to check the connectivity between the ECS instance and your data center.
    If you can receive echo reply packets, it indicates that the connection is switched to the standby VBR in the failover group.