Methods and systems for facilitating fault tolerance in a non-hot-standby configuration of a network routing system are provided. According to one embodiment, a failover method is provided. A fault manager executing on a control blade of multiple server blades of a network routing system actively monitors an active processing engine of multiple processing engines within the network routing system. Responsive to detecting a fault associated with the active processing engine, the active processing engine is dynamically replaced with a non-hot-standby processing engine of the multiple processing engines by (i) determining one or more software contexts that were associated with the active processing engine prior to detection of the fault, and (ii) creating one or more replacement software contexts within the non-hot-standby processing engine corresponding to the one or more software contexts.