[c-nsp] Swap hsrp with vrrp in mixed physical/vmware environment?

David Hubbard dhubbard at dino.hostasaurus.com
Thu Mar 21 14:14:19 EDT 2013


So this should be fun; I need to swich from HSRP to
VRRP to facilitate bringing in a second vendor's
hardware to interoperate.  We run ipv4 and
ipv6 (static assignments) and the VLANs are a mix
of physical servers along with vmware guests on
Cisco UCS with the fabric interconnects in end-host
mode.  Physical and vmware guest OS's are mostly
linux with a very small number of Windows.

I've read that at least on the ipv4 side, many
Windows servers will not accept the gratuitous arp
when vrrp is brought up so they'll just sit there
happily talking to the dead hsrp MAC.  I can't find
much of any info on how they'd deal with the change on
the ipv6 side.  Not a huge deal either way since
the Windows stuff is minimal but would like to go
in knowing what to expect and what needs to be done.

On the linux side, I'm pretty sure it will accept the
arp and update the ipv4 default gateway mac; at least
it does when testing MITM attacks.  Would love to
hear real world experience with this though.  For
ipv6, I can't find much on what it does if its
previously learned router's link local address goes
unreachable, if it will replace the neighbor table
entry with the new vrrp advertised entry, do a
solicitation on its own, etc.  

I'd greatly appreciate any input, thanks,

David



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