John is using Management HA.

In Management HA, you should use the active SmartConsole for making changes. The active SmartConsole is connected to the Primary Security Management Server, which is responsible for synchronizing the configuration with the Secondary Security Management Server. If you use the secondary SmartCenter, your changes will not be replicated to the primary SmartCenter and will be lost in case of a failover. References: Check Point Resource Library, page 9