Can I disable global Load Balancing if only one WAN is used on the firewall? What are the dependencies of Load Balancing being enabled globally for SonicOS?
It is never recommended to disable Failover & LB globally.
Failover and LB (FLB) actively monitors WAN connections and act accordingly on failure/recovery of the WAN interface(s). You should think of the overall effect as a system-wide response to failure/recovery of WAN connections. Even if you only have one WAN, you still benefit because of faster recovery procedures performed on that one WAN as normal part of FLB.
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It keeps status data for the WAN interfaces that can be queried by interested parties whenever they want. Some SonicOS apps request asynchronous notification from FLB whenever a failure/recovery event happens on an interface they are interested in (normally, the Primary WAN) and those apps may perform some app-defined function which is outside the scope of FLB.
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This is what FLB does when a WAN interface failure had been detected (linkDown or probing-failure or no-IP-settings):
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This is what FLB does when a WAN interface recovery had been detected (linkUp or probing-success or IP-change):