1. Home
  2. Nortel Networks
  3. alteon and vrrp failover

alteon and vrrp failover

hello, i have a few questions about alteons and vrrp (active/standby failover). if we have 2 alteons in the configuration, each has 2 interfaces - one the outside(virtual server) and one inside(facing the real servers). These also have vrrp addresses configured. The master we give each one priority 101 and the standby left at default.

1) What is the difference between enabling the 'group' settting in vrrp or not having it, does it mean if you dont enable it, you could effectively have one active vrrp on one alteon and one active vrrp on another? 2) For each vrrp, you can say what you want to track on. i.e. reals, ports etc, how does this work and why would you use it,this does not seem to have any effect when using the group method. 3) In what cirumstance would you enable more priority on an individual vrrp address?

Thanks for any help.

Reply to
cconnell_1
Loading thread data ...

for your questions;

1) A group aggregates all virtual routers you asign and these virtual routers will failover as a group, and cannot failover individually. It is usually used for routing purposes.

2) A track affects VRRP function a lot. The VRRP on Alteon is different from traditional VRRP at other platforms. Each track is an factor for calculating priority of virtual router. Once you setup a wrong priority or track, the VRRP failover might not success.

3) Do you know why the person who setup these Alteon's gave priorities as 101 and 100? Each track or interface has 2 points for calculating VRRP priority. Once an interface goes down, that priority will be 101-2 = 99 and this triggers VRRP failover on both Alteon's.
Reply to
Dophi

Ok thankyou. The alteon1 has higher prirority as it is defined as master- what happens when the priority of a vrrp is the same - how does it decide which one to use? I thought in active-stanby one must be higher normally. Also does the group setting overide any track settings you have for individual vrrp addresses? I seem to remember it did.

Reply to
cconnell_1

When the priorities on both Alteon's are the same in a VLAN, both of them might be masters or slaves and this will cause clients connected to Alteon get confused. Routing at different VLAN's will be failed. Never let the priorities of Alteon's be the same in a VLAN. If you want to know how it decide to be a master or slave, please refer to RFC 2338 and 3768 for detail information.

The gourp setting never really overides any track settings. When group enabled, all virtual routers behave as one entity, and all group settings override any individual virtual router settings or service-based vrgroup settings. Once one member of a VRRP group fails, the priority of the group decreases, and the state of the entire switch changes from master to backup.

For example, the interface of VLAN 1 is down and the virtual router of VLAN 1 is grouped with another one of VLAN 2. At this time, both virtual routers of VLAN 1 and 2 go down no matter the interface of VLAN

2 is up or down. Why do we like to setup this? Because we don't want the interface 2 deal with any routing packets when interface 1 which connects to a default gateway is down.

As your mentioned, you would like to have one active VRRP on one Alteon and one active on another one. You can do it, and it's an "Active-Active" mode. But each VSR on different Alteon should provide different service. i.e. HTTP service VSR on Alteon 1 and FTP service VSR on Alteon 2. Which means, Alteon 1 is the active device to responce HTTP request and Alteon 2 is avctive device to reponce FTP service at the same time.

Reply to
Dophi

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.