VRRP
Virtual Router
Redundancy Protocol. VRRP specifies an election protocol that dynamically assigns
responsibility for a
virtual router (VR) to one of the VRRP routers
on a LAN. The VRRP router controlling the IP address(es) associated with a virtual router is
called the master router, and forwards packets sent to these IP addresses. The election
process provides dynamic failover in the forwarding responsibility should the master router
become unavailable. In case the master router fails, the virtual IP address is mapped to a
backup router's IP address; this backup becomes the master router. This allows any of the
virtual router IP addresses on the LAN to be used as the default first-hop router by
end-hosts. The advantage gained from using VRRP is a higher availability default path
without requiring configuration of dynamic routing or router discovery protocols on every
host. VRRP is defined in RFC 2338.