Sunday, January 12, 2014

Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP)

Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) is similar to HSRP, but it is an open standard (RFC 2338). 
Two or more devices act as a virtual router. With VRRP, however, the IP address used can be either a virtual one or the actual IP address of the primary router. VRRP is supported only on Cisco 4500 and 6500 series switches.

The VRRP Masterrouter forwards traffic. The master is chosen because it owns the real address, or it has the highest priority. (The default is 100.) If a real address is supported, the owner of real address mustbe master. 

A Backup router takes over if the master fails, and there can be multiple backup routers. They monitor periodic hellos multicast by the master to 224.0.0.18, using UDP port 112, to detect a failure of the master router.

Multiple VRRP groups are allowed, just as with HSRP.
Routers in the same VRRP group must belong to the same subnet/VLAN. To enable VRRP, give this command vrrp group-numberip virtual-IP-address under the interface connecting to that subnet or VLAN:


Router(config-if) # vrrp 39 ip 10.0.0.1

Control the master and backup elections by configuring priority values from 1–255. If a master VRRP router is shut down, it advertises a priority of 0. This triggers the backup routers to hold an election without waiting for the master’s hellos to time out.

Router(config-if)# vrrp 39 priority 175



VRRP uses the following timers:

  • Advertisement, or hello, interval in seconds. Default is 1 second.
  • Master down interval. Equals 3 x advertisement interval plus skew time. Similar to a hold or dead timer.
  • Skew time. (256–priority) / 256. This is meant to ensure that the highest priority backup router becomes master because higher priority routers have shorter master down intervals.

To change the timers on the master, use the following command because it is the router that advertises the hellos:

Router(config-if)# vrrp 39 timers advertise 5




To change the timers on the backup routers, use the following command because they hear the hellos from the master:

Router(config-if)# vrrp 39 timers learn


VRRP cannot track interfaces but can track IP SLA object groups.


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