Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (Overview)

Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) is an Internet standard protocol specified in Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol Version 3 for IPv4 and IPv6 and is supported in the Oracle Solaris 11 Express operating system (OS) to provide high availability. The Oracle Solaris 11 Express OS provides an administrative tool that configures and manages the VRRP service.

When you set up a network such as a LAN, it is very important to provide a high availability service. One way to increase the reliability of the network is to provide backups of the critical components in the network. Adding components such as routers, switches, and links to the network ensures the continuity of the service across failures. Providing redundancy at the endpoints of a network is a crucial task and it can be done easily with VRRP. Virtual routers can be introduced in the LAN by using VRRP to provide failure recovery for a router.

To know more about the terms used in VRRP, see VRRP Terminology.

This chapter includes the following sections:

• VRRP Terminology

• VRRP Architectural Overview

• VRRP Limitations

VRRP is an election protocol that dynamically assigns the responsibilities of a virtual router to one of the VRRP routers within the LAN. VRRP provides one or more backup routers for a statically configured router on the LAN.

A VRRP router called the master router controls the IPv4 or IPv6 address or addresses that are associated with the virtual router. The virtual router forwards the packets that are sent to the IP address of the master router.

The election process provides dynamic failover while forwarding packets sent to these IP addresses. VRRP eliminates the single point of failure that is inherent in the static default routed environment.

By using the VRRP feature in the Oracle Solaris 11 Express OS, you can have a more highly available default path for the routing process without having to configure the dynamic routing or router discovery protocols on every end-host.