The present disclosure presents systems and methods for maintaining operation of a first multi-core appliance 200 by a second multi-core appliance upon failover of the first multi-core appliance. A secondary appliance may receive information about configuration settings and operations of a plurality of packet processing engines (PPEs), each of the PPEs operating on one of a plurality of cores of the primary multi-core appliance. Status of operation of the plurality of PPEs of the primary appliance may be monitored by exchanging communication between the primary and secondary appliances. Configuration settings for each of a PPEs operating on the cores of the secondary appliance may be established responsive to detection that one or more of the PPEs of the primary appliance is unavailable. Configuration information for each of the PPEs of the secondary appliance may be propagated to the plurality of the PPEs of the secondary appliance.