When a pair of Edges are configured in a High Availability topology, the Active SD-WAN Edge will exchange BGP routes over the HA link. Where Enhanced HA is used, BGP on the Active Edge establishes neighborship with a peer connected only to the standby Edge’s WAN link.

Beginning with SD-WAN Release 5.1.0 and onwards, a site deployed in High Availability with BGP configured automatically synchronizes local routes between the Active and Standby Edges and uses these routes for forwarding on the Active Edge while also ensuring that the route table is immediately available after an HA failover. This results in improved failover times as the routes are already available on the Standby Edge when it is promoted to Active.

Note: To fully optimize HA failovers where BGP is used in Standard and Enhanced HA topologies, it is strongly recommended to also activate the BGP Graceful Restart feature. Information about this feature is found in the High Availability Graceful Switchover with BGP Graceful Restart documentation.