ACE 4710 Active/Active using virtual partitions

Question

Hi
I am completely new to the Cisco ACE devices but have been asked to look at deploying them.  I have read the ACE virtual partioning paper which covers the ACE module, and it mentions the following;
"In an active/active high-availability design, both the primary and backup Cisco ACE modules are active simultaneously. The active virtual partitions are distributed across both modules, such that approximately half are active on the primary module and the remaining are active on the backup module."
My question is - does the same resilience model work the same using the Cisco 4710 appliances?  I.e. can we split virtual partions across two physical devices thereby having an active/active scenario.
Apologies if this seems a very basic question.
Cheers
TS

Answer 1

Hi Tony
Yes, you can do the same on Appliance. One point which can be important for A/A implementation is that it's a good practice to have shared-vlan-hostid configured on ACEs.
Briefly - When ACE boots it randomly picks up a one out of 16 pools of MAC addresses and use them on interfaces. So, if you have contexts which are sharing the same VLAN on different ACEs , there is a possibility that both of ACEs pick up the same pool and you will have duplicated MAC addresses.
So you should configure something like this in Admin context (only on ACE which has Admin context active, configuration starts working only after reload of both devices) :
shared-vlan-hostid 1
peer shared-vlan-hostid 2
More detailed abou this quesiton you can see here :
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/interfaces_modules/services_modules/ace/vA4_2_0/configuration/administration/guide/redundcy.html#wp1076704