HP 445946-001 Vrrp overview, Vrrp components, Virtual router MAC address, Owners and renters

High availability

VRRP overview

In a high-availability network topology, no device can create a single point-of-failure for the network or force a single point-of-failure to any other part of the network. This means that your network will remain in service despite the failure of any single device. To achieve this usually requires redundancy for all vital network components.

VRRP enables redundant router configurations within a LAN, providing alternate router paths for a host to eliminate single points-of-failure within a network. Each participating VRRP-capable routing device is configured with the same virtual router IP address and ID number. One of the virtual routers is elected as the master, based on a number of priority criteria, and assumes control of the shared virtual router IP address. If the master fails, one of the backup virtual routers will take control of the virtual router IP address and actively process traffic addressed to it.

With VRRP, Virtual Interface Routers (VIR) allows two VRRP routers to share an IP interface across the routers. VIRs provide a single Destination IP (DIP) for upstream routers to reach various servers, and provide a virtual default Gateway for the server blades.

VRRP components

Each physical router running VRRP is known as a VRRP router.

Virtual router

Two or more VRRP routers can be configured to form a virtual router (RFC 2338). Each VRRP router may participate in one or more virtual routers. Each virtual router consists of a user-configured virtual router identifier (VRID) and an IP address.

Virtual router MAC address

The VRID is used to build the virtual router MAC Address. The five highest-order octets of the virtual router MAC Address are the standard MAC prefix (00-00-5E-00-01) defined in RFC 2338. The VRID is used to form the lowest-order octet.

Owners and renters

Only one of the VRRP routers in a virtual router may be configured as the IP address owner. This router has the virtual router’s IP address as its real interface address. This router responds to packets addressed to the virtual router’s IP address for ICMP pings, TCP connections, and so on.

There is no requirement for any VRRP router to be the IP address owner. Most VRRP installations choose not to implement an IP address owner. For the purposes of this chapter, VRRP routers that are not the IP address owner are called renters.

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