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The Cisco ASA FW has a simple and robust failover mechanism. It works so well that sometimes an administrator may not realize that the load has moved from the primary device to the secondary device. When connecting to the IP address, the primary IP address for the interface follows the active unit. So it is even possible to be logged in to a different Firewall than the administrator thinks they are in.
This can easily be determined by doing a show failover. In the output, it is easy to see if the unit is the Primary or Secondary (configured state) and Active or Standby (operational state). Since the ASA Failover is not preemptive, any glitch moving the load to standby will result in the load remaining there (unless there is a subsequent failure or manual failback).
Given the fact that I am a huge fan of situational awareness, I like to reflect the state in the CLI prompt. This is a simple configuration change.
asav-1#
asav-1# conf t
asav-1(config)# prompt hostname priority state
asav-1/pri/act(config)# exit
asav-1/pri/act#
As can be seen above, a simple configuration change results in the ASA displaying its hostname, configured priority and operational state.