CARP configuration
Whereas pfSense's load balancing capabilities may leave something to be desired, pfSense's high availability capabilities are quite good, and pfSense offers an enterprise class CARP solution that provides for stateful failover. We will first consider a basic CARP group for firewall failover, but we will also consider other scenarios involving CARP, such as multi-WAN deployments.
Note
Version 2.4.3 added support for Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) on CARP virtual IPs. The PPPoE connection will only be active on the master node.
Example 1 – CARP with two firewalls
This is probably the most common deployment scenario in which CARP is involved. There are two common deployment scenarios you could employ for a two firewall setup in which one firewall is designated as the failover. Both of them involve a single virtual IP for the LAN interface, separate actual IPs for each LAN interface, and the LAN interface on each firewall connecting to a switch on the LAN side...