“This slide shows the order when the HA override setting is disabled, which is the default behavior.”
“1. The cluster compares the number of monitored interfaces that have a status of up. The member with the most available monitored interfaces becomes the primary.
2. The cluster compares the HA uptime of each member. The member with the highest HA uptime, by at least five minutes, becomes the primary.
3. The member with the highest priority becomes the primary.”
“When HA override is disabled, the HA uptime has precedence over the priority setting. This means that if you must manually fail over to a secondary device, you can do so by reducing the HA uptime of the primary FortiGate. You can do this by running the diagnose sys ha reset-uptime command on the primary FortiGate, which resets its HA uptime to 0.”
Technical Deep Dive:
The correct answer is A .
Both HA members are configured with set override disable , so FGCP does not prefer the higher-priority unit first. With override disabled, the election order is based on monitored interfaces , then HA uptime , then priority , and finally serial number . Since the cluster has been running for one week , the secondary unit will have a much higher HA uptime than a unit whose uptime is reset to zero. Therefore, if the administrator runs diagnose sys ha reset-uptime on the current primary HQ-NGFW-1 , FGCP re-evaluates election and the other member can take over.
Option B is wrong because enabling override only on HQ-NGFW-2 does not by itself force an immediate clean failover in this scenario and also changes election behavior rather than performing the documented manual failover action. Option C is wrong because with override disabled, priority does not beat HA uptime . Option D can simulate a link failover , but the study guide’s documented manual failover method for this exact override-disabled condition is to reset the primary’s HA uptime.
Relevant CLI:
diagnose sys ha reset-uptime
get system ha status
diagnose sys ha status
This is the clean exam-aligned method to trigger a controlled HA role change.
