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.