Technical Summary
This memo defines the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) for
IPv4 and IPv6. It is version three (3) of the protocol and it is
based on VRRP (version 2) for IPv4 that is defined in RFC 3768 and on
draft-ieft-vrrp-ipv6-spec-08.txt. VRRP specifies an election
protocol that dynamically assigns responsibility for a virtual router
to one of the VRRP routers on a LAN. The VRRP router controlling the
IPv4 or IPv6 address(es) associated with a virtual router is called
the Master, and forwards packets sent to these IPv4 or IPv6
addresses. VRRP Master routers are configured with virtual IPv4 or
IPv6 addresses and VRRP Backup routers infer the address family of
the virtual addresses being carried based on the transport protocol.
Within a VRRP router the virtual routers in each of the IPv4 and IPv6
address families are a domain unto themselves and do not overlap.
The election process provides dynamic fail over in the forwarding
responsibility should the Master become unavailable. For IPv4, the
advantage gained from using VRRP is a higher availability default
path without requiring configuration of dynamic routing or router
discovery protocols on every end-host. For IPv6, the advantage
gained from using VRRP for IPv6 is a quicker switch over to back up
routers than can be obtained with standard IPv6 Neighbor Discover
(RFC 4861) mechanisms.
Working Group Summary
No. The technology is widely deployed.
Document Quality
Again, the technology is widely deployed with numerous interoperable
implementations. The technology has been around for 10 or so years.
Personnel
Mukesh Gupta is the document shepherd
Adrian Farrel is the responsible AD