Hi pylon,

I have already requested via support that Mikrotik implement true "High Availability" ala FortiGate's.

CARP could be a base for this, but I think they should forget any idea of inter-vendor compatibility and extend CARP to allow for full replication of all settings and states, and allow single point firmware upgrade for a cluster.

Janis replied to say that it is a feature they will consider once they have finished current projects.

I think as a starting point, they should implement config synchronization and an active-passive failover mechanism, even if it drops the states it would be a start. replicating states can be added later as long as it has been designed into the original spec.

The FortiGate HA is the best I have seen, it allows you to set interfaces to "monitor" if the link state of one of the monitored interfaces changes to down, the HA will fail over to the other unit. (you can even monitor status of LACP/bonded links) It also allows you to specify heartbeat interfaces which it sends out the heartbeat broadcasts on.
It also allows you to create clusters of firewalls, that share all configuration, states and elect a master based on a specified unit priority. All management is done via the cluster IP addresses, and when you update the firmware it updates and reboots all the "slave" units first then it fails the active unit over to one of the updated slaves before updating the master without dropping any connections.