Patent ID: 8327181

Claim:
A method for maintaining operation upon failover from a first multi-core appliance to a second multi-core appliance, the method comprising: (a) receiving, by a secondary appliance having a plurality of cores from a primary appliance having a plurality of cores via a transport layer connection between the secondary appliance and the primary appliance, information about a configuration and operation of a plurality of packet processing engines (PPEs) of the primary appliance, each PPE operating on each of the plurality of cores of the primary appliance; (b) monitoring, by a first core of the secondary appliance, a status of operation of the plurality of PPEs of the primary appliance; (c) detecting, by the secondary appliance responsive to monitoring, that one or more of the plurality of PPEs of the primary appliance are unavailable; and (d) establishing, by the first core of the secondary appliance responsive to the detection, configuration of each of PPEs on each of a plurality of cores of the secondary appliance in accordance with the received information.