Synergy mode is obviously very new and there is not a lot of public documentation available but I have one question that hopefully can be addressed by someone from Peplink.
Scenario:
Customer has 2x Balance 580X in HA and are looking to add multiple 4G/5G failover paths.
We are looking to supply BR2 Pro 5G for the cellular side as they fit very well here in terms of price point and physical deployment constraints, we can mount them in a good location with short RF cable runs to the outside of the building and then run UTP back directly to the WAN ports of the 580X.
Typically we would just create some VLANs on the BR2 Pro and do some outbound policy to enforce one VLAN out to the internet via each 5G modem, that works well and is a proven deployment for us.
However, it does burn 1 Ethernet WAN port per modem on their 580X to deliver that connectivity into the 580X - this is where we think Synergy comes in as a strong option.
580X can function as the synergy controller, BR2 pro would be a synergised device with a single ethernet connection directly to the 580X WAN of choice - 2 modems, 1 ethernet port used, which is great as this customer already had 2x fibre leased lines and 1x microwave backup but would like at least 4x 4g/5g failover paths too - we start to run out of ethernet ports (without resorting to usb-eth) on the 580X
My question comes from what happens in an HA scenario - how does the failover work if the primary 580X has an issue, I do not currently have enough equipment in my test lab to set this up to replicate the clients environment but would like to understand the following:
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Does this even work, and is it a supported configuration - if not would there be plans to add this?
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What are the failover times involved for the Synergy controller / device side of things, given that there is control plane traffic involved here I expect this is non-trivial and likely a bit longer than just simple WAN failover which works well.