Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) is an election protocol that provides redundancy to routers within a Local Area Network (LAN).
VRRP was designed to eliminate a single point of failure in a static default-route environment by dynamically assigning virtual IP routers to participating hosts. A virtual router is a collection of physical routers whose interfaces must belong to the same IP subnet. A virtual router ID (VRID) is assigned to each virtual router, but there is no restriction against reusing a VRID with a different address mapping on different LANs.
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VRRP extended (VRRP-E) is an extended version of the VRRP protocol. Extreme Networks developed VRRP-E as a proprietary protocol to address some limitations in standards-based VRRP.Before examining more details about how VRRP works, it is useful to see why VRRP was developed to solve the issue of a single point of failure.
To connect to the Internet or an internal intranet Host 1, in the figure, uses the IP address of 192.168.4.1 on Router 1 as its default gateway. If this interface goes down, Host 1 is cut off from the rest of the network. Router 1 is a single point of failure for Host 1 to access other networks. In small networks, the administrative burden of configuring Router 2 as the new default gateway is not an issue, but in larger networks reconfiguring default gateways is impractical. Configuring a VRRP virtual router on Router 1 and Router 2 provides a redundant path for the hosts. VRRP allows you to provide alternate router paths for a host without changing the IP address or MAC address by which the host knows its gateway.
To illustrate how VRRP works, the following figure shows the same network, but a VRRP virtual router is configured on the two physical routers, Router 1 and Router 2. This virtual router provides redundant network access for Host 1. If Router 1 were to fail, Router 2 would provide the default gateway out of the subnet.
The blue rectangle in the figure represents a VRRP virtual router. When you configure a virtual router, one of the configuration parameters is a group number (also known as a virtual router ID or VRID), which can be a number from 1 through 255. The virtual router is identified with a group, and within the VRRP group, there is one physical device that forwards packets for the virtual router and this is called a master VRRP device. The VRRP master device may be a Layer 3 switch or a router.
In VRRP, one of the physical IP addresses is configured as the IP address of the virtual router, the virtual IP address. The device on which the virtual IP address is assigned becomes the VRRP owner, and this device responds to packets addressed to any of the IP addresses in the virtual router group. The owner device becomes the master VRRP device by default and is assigned the highest priority. Backup devices are configured as members of the virtual router group, and, if the master device goes offline, one of the backup devices assumes the role of the master device.
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VRRP operation is independent of BGP4, OSPF, and ISIS. Their operation is unaffected when VRRP is enabled on the same interface as BGP4, OSPF, or ISIS.