Introduction to Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol V3 (VRRPv3)

Today I am going to talk about the VRRPv3 protocol and also will share the sample configuration for VRRPv3. Before we start with VRRPv3 protocol, let’s talk about VRRP protocol. VRRP stands for Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol. 

VRRP act as same as HSRP protocol and permits a collection of network devices to create a single virtual device to deliver redundancy. The LAN switches in the network can then be configured with the virtual device as their default gateway.The virtual device, indicating a group of network devices and is called as VRRP group.

Introduction to VRRPv3
As we talked about VRRP protocol, now let’s talk about VRRPv3. VRRPv3 Protocol Support feature delivers the ability to support IPv4 and IPv6 addresses while VRRPv2 only supports IPv4 addresses. VRRPv3 introduces IPv6 address support for both standard VRRP and VRRP enhanced (VRRP-E).

As compared to VRRPv2, VRRPv3 supports usage of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses while VRRPv2 only supports IPv4 addresses. The other addition to the feature in VRRPv3 is to use over multi-access, multicast, or broadcast capable Ethernet LANs.

VRRPv3 can be used over the Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Bridge Group Virtual Interface (BVI), and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and on Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), VRF-aware MPLS VPNs, and VLANs. Make a note that VRRPv3 doesn’t support SSO and authentication. 

Fig 1.1- VRRPv3 Protocol
VRRP Operation
The operation of VRRP is where the virtual router master directs VRRP advertisements to other VRRP routers in the similar group. The advertisements interconnect the priority and state of the virtual router master. The VRRP advertisements are encapsulated into either IPv4 or IPv6 packets (based on the VRRP group configuration) and sent to the appropriate multicast address assigned to the VRRP group. For IPv4, the multicast address is 224.0.0.18. For IPv6, the multicast address is FF02:0:0:0:0:0:0:12. 

VRRPv3 for IPv6 needs a primary virtual link-local IPv6 address is designed to permit the group to function. After the primary link-local IPv6 address is proven on the group, you can add the secondary global addresses. Below is the sample configuration to enable VRRPv3 where we are going to define VRRPv3 on device, then create VRRP group and configure FHRP as below.

Enabling VRRPv3 on a Device
RouteXP> enable
RouteXP # configure terminal
RouteXP (config)# fhrp version vrrp v3
RouteXP (config-if-vrrp) # end
      
Creating and Customizing a VRRP Group
RouteXP > enable
RouteXP # configure terminal
RouteXP (config)# fhrp version vrrp v3
RouteXP (config)# interface gigabitethernet0/1
RouteXP (config-if) # vrrp 3 address-family ipv4
RouteXP (config-if-vrrp) # address 10.0.1.1 primary
RouteXP (config-if-vrrp) # description group 3
RouteXP (config-if-vrrp) # match-address  
RouteXP (config-if-vrrp) # preempt delay minimum 10
RouteXP (config-if-vrrp) # end

Configuring the Delay Period Before FHRP Client Initialization
RouteXP > enable
RouteXP # configure terminal
RouteXP (config)# fhrp version vrrp v3
RouteXP (config)# interface gigabitethernet0/1
RouteXP (config-if) # fhrp delay minimum 5
RouteXP (config-if-vrrp) # end