SonicWall High Availability licensing enforcement message error

03/26/2020 14 14848

DESCRIPTION:
: HA Licensing Enforcement message - .....The SonicWall High Availability Policy allows you to use this appliance only in conjunction with an identical device designated as the Primary device. ...

RESOLUTION:

The following message is displayed in the System | Licenses page under Security Services Summary:

This is a SonicWall High Availability appliance. The SonicWall High Availability Policy allows you to use this appliance only in conjunction with an identical device designated as the Primary device. All licensing applied on your Primary device will automatically available on this Secondary device. Please designate a Primary device for this unit at www.mysonicwall.com.

This message is displayed when a Secondary HA unit is configured as a Primary HA unit.  However, this does not cause any interruption in traffic.

This error is caused due to the SonicWall licensing server enforcing HA Primary and Secondary units. This would affect HA system running on any Enhanced version, Gen4 or Gen5. This is related to backend licensing independent of firmware version. This means a unit designated as HF Primary should be configured as a Primary HA unit and a unit designated as HF Secondary should be configured as a Secondary HA unit. To clear the message, configure the current primary as backup and current backup as primary.  All necessary HA association and transfer of licenses needs to be done at www.mysonicwall.com. This new enforcement is applied to both Gen4 and Gen5 units that are configured in HA.

Note: Re-designating the appliances would entail breaking the HA. You are required to take downtime window before making configuration changes on the HA.

Perform the following steps to configure the current primary as backup and current backup as primary.

1. Disassociate the backup HA on www.mysonicwall.com
2. Transfer the licenses from current primary to backup unit ( This would be done by customer support)
3. Re-associate current backup as primary and current primary as backup on mySonicWall (or) sandbox
4. Configuration in the SonicWall UTM appliances.

4a: On the active unit, navigate to the High Availability | Settings screen and disable the "Enable High Availability" checkbox.
4b: Disconnect the backup unit and set it to factory defaults.
4c: Export settings from standalone primary unit.
4d: Import primary settings into old backup unit, which is becoming the new primary unit.
4e: Set old primary unit to factory default settings.
4f:  Re-enable the "Enable High Availability" checkbox on the new Primary unit, with the new backup unit's SonicWall serial numbers.
4g: Reconnect the new backup unit to the network and make sure it synchonizes.
4h: Re-synchonize the licenses of the firewalls, using button System | Licenses screen.