The heartbeat mechanism focuses on providing extended heartbeat capability to monitor the following types of devices when the devices are connected to the inline-tool pair of ports as a tool:
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GigaVUE nodes with GigaSMART operations configured |
Following figure illustrates an example of a topology with GigaVUE nodes placed at three different layers.
The GigaVUE node at the access layer accesses the network traffic, gets the traffic processed by the tools at the tool layer, and transmits the processed traffic back to the network.
The GigaVUE node at the distribution layer distributes the traffic from the access layer to the tool layer.
The GigaVUE node at the tool layer acts as the SSL decryption tool.
In this topology, heartbeats are essential to monitor the traffic integrity at the distribution layer and to ensure automatic failover in case of a tool failure. In the access layer device, the ports that are connected to the distribution layer device are configured as inline tool ports because they face the tool side. In the distribution layer device, the ports that are connected to the access layer device are configured as inline network ports because they face the network side of the topology. The heartbeat packets will be sent from the inline tool port pair of the access layer device to the inline network port pair of the distribution layer device. If the forwarding state of the inline network pair is normal, the heartbeat packet is sent back to the inline tool port pair of the access layer device. Else, the packet is dropped.
The heartbeat mechanism is extended to support the GigaVUE node at the distribution layer to monitor the GigaVUE node that acts as a tool at the tool layer. In the distribution layer device, the ports that are connected to the tool layer device are configured as inline tool ports. In the tool layer device, the ports that are connected to the distribution layer device are configured as inline network ports. The heartbeat packets that are sent from the distribution layer device to the tool layer device will monitor the availability of both, the tool layer device and its GigaSMART engines.