Hi Aaron, This is just a guess. Assuming you have something in (or have accepted the defaults of) "max-unacked-clients" and "max-ack-delay" (see here: https://kea.readthedocs.io/en/stable/arm/hooks.html#load-balancing-configuration) then you'll need to make use of -y and -Y (see here: https://kea.readthedocs.io/en/stable/man/perfdhcp.8.html) in perfdhcp to simulate a failover event + actually have Kea failover. Something like:
perfdhcp -6 -e address-and-prefix -r 1 -R 100 -Y 5 -y 300 -p 300 would send dhcp6 queries with ia_na and ia_pd requests at the rate of 1 per second simulating a total of 100 clients. five seconds into the test it will start increasing the dhcp6 elapsed seconds option. It will do this for 300 seconds. The -p causes the test to run for 300 seconds. Shut down your primary Kea server sometime after starting perfdhcp and failover should occur. You should see log messages like this one: https://kea.readthedocs.io/en/stable/kea-messages.html#ha-communication-interrupted-client6-unacked until more clients than "max-unacked-clients" are encountered at which point the standby or secondary server should start to answer the clients. Thank you, Darren Ankney On Tue, Dec 2, 2025 at 3:49 PM Aaron Gould <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi KEA Users, my 2 server engineer coworkers and I (i'm the network guy) > are trying to setup KEA HA Failover for the first time, in our lab. We > have lab endpoints and perfdhcp to test with. We are generating > hundreds of dhcpv6 ia_na and ia_pd requests, and the juniper dhcpv6 > relay router is logging the binding states just fine. We try to > failover the primary kea server, and see if the backup kea server will > start replying to dhcpv6 requests, but the backup never seems to respond. > > I read some of a previous post from April 2016, but need a bit more > guidance, lessons learned, and perhaps up-to-date 2025 info. > > I would appreciate any guidance any of you all could provide. > > > -- > -Aaron > > -- > ISC funds the development of this software with paid support subscriptions. > Contact us at https://www.isc.org/contact/ for more information. > > To unsubscribe visit https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/kea-users. > [email protected] -- ISC funds the development of this software with paid support subscriptions. Contact us at https://www.isc.org/contact/ for more information. To unsubscribe visit https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/kea-users. [email protected]
