Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol

Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) is the industry standard version of Ciscos Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP).

VRRP and HSRP operate in an almost identical manner with a few differences:

• Where HSRP has Active and Standby, VRRP has master and backup
• HSRP has preemption disable by default, VRRP has preemption enabled by default
• The virtual MAC address differs in VRRP, where it is 0000.5e00.01XX where XX is the group number in hexidecimal.
• VRRP also uses multicast to communicate, but on address 224.0.0.18

There are two versions of VRRP, VRRP version 2 and VRRP version 3. Version 3 supports IPv4 and IPv6, version 2 only supports IPv4.