Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) is designed to eliminate the single point of failure inherent in a static default routed environment by providing redundancy to Layer 3 devices within a local area network (LAN). VRRP uses an election protocol to dynamically assign the default gateway for a host to one of a group of VRRP routers on a LAN. Alternate gateway router paths can be allocated without changing the IP address or MAC address by which the host device knows its gateway.
VRRPv3 implements support for IPv6 addresses for networks using IPv6, and it also supports IPv4 addresses for dual-stack networks configured with VRRP or VRRP-E. VRRPv3 is compliant with RFC 5798. The benefit of implementing VRRPv3 is faster switchover to backup devices than can be achieved using standard IPv6 neighbor discovery mechanisms. With VRRPv3, a backup router can become a master router in a few seconds with less overhead traffic and no interaction with the hosts.
When VRRPv3 is configured, the master device that owns the virtual IP address and a master device that does not own the virtual IP address can both respond to ICMP echo requests (using the ping command) and accept Telnet and other management traffic sent to the virtual IP address. In VRRPv2, only a master device on which the virtual IP address is the address of an interface on the master device can respond to ping and other management traffic.
The following are other IPv6 VRRPv3 functionality details:
Note
When implementing IPv6 VRRPv3 across a network with devices from other vendors, be aware of a potential interoperability issue with IPv6 VRRPv3 and other vendor equipment. Extreme has implemented IPv6 VRRPv3 functionality to comply with RFC 5798 and will interoperate comfortably with other vendors that support RFC 5798.