HP ProCurve VRRP with different Physical and Virtual IP address

In case you are having HP ProCurve Core Switches, and need to configure redundancy on it, you need to configure VRRP to achieve it. I will assume you have the knowledge of HSRP for this post.

Somehow, HP ProCurve switches does not support a separate Virtual IP address than the Physical IP address for VRRP. Although, many other vendors do support it (Virtual IP being different than the Physical IP addresses (in the same network)). HP ProCurve requires that the Virtual IP address to be the same as the Master's Physical IP address. I am not sure why they want us to enforce the Virtual IP address being the same as Master's Physical IP address, since this creates issues, especially in Monitoring software. For e.g., you want to monitor both Cores by their IP address. Since they are running VRRP, and if master fails, the Master's IP address will still show as "UP", since the virtual IP (which is same as Master's Physical IP address) has shifted to the Backup/Secondary/Slave Core.

To avoid such scenario, there is a workaround for the same. This workaround is using the priority of VRRP. We will keep ALL the Core Switches in Backup state, and just adjust their priorities to set master accordingly. (Higher Priority wins. 255 is maximum, which is reserved for Owner/Manual Master). So it is recommended to use Priority 254 for the Master and less for others/Backup.

Consider the following VRRP configuration for vlan 10 (192.168.10.0/24). And the Gateway for the users is 192.168.10.254. The IP address for the Core Switches you prefer is 192.168.10.1 and 192.168.10.2 for Core-1 and Core-2 respectively.

The normal scenario would be:

MASTER	BACKUP
Core-1# conf t Core-1 (config)# vlan 10 Core-1 (vlan-10)# ip address 192.168.10.254 255.255.255.0 Core-1 (vlan-10)# vrrp vrid 10 Core-1 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# owner Core-1 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# virtual-ip-address 192.168.10.254 255.255.255.0 Core-1 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# enable Core-1 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# exit	Core-2# conf t Core-2 (config)# vlan 10 Core-2 (vlan-10)# ip address 192.168.10.2 255.255.255.0 Core-2 (vlan-10)# vrrp vrid 10 Core-2 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# backup Core-2 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# virtual-ip-address 192.168.10.254 255.255.255.0 Core-2 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# enable Core-2 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# exit

In this normal case, you gave IP address as follows:

Core-1: 192.168.10.254

Core-2: 192.168.10.2

Virtual-IP: 192.168.10.254

The workaround scenario would be:

MASTER	BACKUP
Core-1# conf t Core-1 (config)# vlan 10 Core-1 (vlan-10)# ip address 192.168.10.1 255.255.255.0 Core-1 (vlan-10)# vrrp vrid 10 Core-1 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# backup Core-1 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# virtual-ip-address 192.168.10.254 255.255.255.0 Core-1 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# priority 254 Core-1 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# enable Core-1 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# exit	Core-2# conf t Core-2 (config)# vlan 10 Core-2 (vlan-10)# ip address 192.168.10.2 255.255.255.0 Core-2 (vlan-10)# vrrp vrid 10 Core-2 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# backup Core-2 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# virtual-ip-address 192.168.10.254 255.255.255.0 Core-2 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# priority 150 Core-2 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# enable Core-2 (vlan-10-vrid-10)# exit

With this workaround, you gave IP address as follows:

Core-1: 192.168.10.1

Core-2: 192.168.10.2

Virtual-IP: 192.168.10.254