System Administration Guide: IP Services

Failure Detection and Failover

Failure detection is the process of detecting when an interface or the path from an interface to an Internet layer device no longer works. IPMP provides systems with the ability to detect when an interface has failed. IPMP detects the following types of communication failures:

After detecting a failure, IPMP begins failover. Failover is the automatic process of switching the network access from a failed interface to a functioning physical interface in the same group. Network access includes IPv4 unicast, multicast, and broadcast traffic, as well as IPv6 unicast and multicast traffic. Failover can only occur when you have configured more than one interface in the IPMP group. The failover process ensures uninterrupted access to the network.