Hey everyone,
Thanks to everyone who's been testing out our AWS HA beta so far. We have updates available, and some new features for you to try out.
Warm Standby
Warm standby offers an option for faster failover. A second AMI is kept running, and synchronized, so in a failover event, there's no wait-time for the new AMI to be launched. The only waiting is for AWS to migrate IP & routing info to the new host.
Firmware Upgrades
With the first release, the only method to upgrade the firmware on an HA pair was to edit the cloudwatch monitoring,to point it to a new AMI. this is not very intuituve at all. In this release, we've incorporated the upgrade process into the standard UTM UI. when new firmware is available in the marketplace, then you can simply click a button in the UTM UI, and the upgrade process will be triggered. A new UTM will be spun up using the newer AMI, it will be synchronized, and the old UTM will be terminated. No extra complexity necessary.
* Currently, the upgrade progress is not able to be shown in the UTM UI for this process. Progress can be monitored from your AWS console.
Improved deployment templates
New templates simplify several choices, like country selection, which allow a country name to be selected from a drop-down list, rather than having to enter a precisely typed string value. Also, the number of countries available for choice is increased.
we expect this phase of testing to be short,before we release this version, so please let us know your feedback.
The new AMI ID is ami-d2f3aaba
The latest CloudFormation templates are available Here:
Cold Standby
https://s3.amazonaws.com/sophos-nsg-cf/utm/utm-9.309-ha_standalone.template
Warm Standby
https://s3.amazonaws.com/sophos-nsg-cf/utm/utm-9.309-ha_warm_standby.template
Upgrading your current system
Since you won't have the new update ui available until you upgrade to this version, the simplest migration is to backup your config, deploy a new HA template, then restore your backup in the new HA setup. If you are pretty comfortable with AWS autoscaling configurations, you can use Amazon's standard method for upgrading, by pointing to the new AMI id.
If you want to switch from cold standby to warm standby, the only method will be to deploy the new HA pair, and restore your backup.
Happy Testing!
