CARP, the better alternative to VRRP

Posted by creining | Filed under Linux/BSD

OpenBSD has just added CARP, the Common Address Redundancy Protocol. From the email to misc@openbsd: 


This protocol allows multiple hosts on the same local network to share a
set of IP addresses among them. Some of the functionality it provides is
similar to VRRP, although CARP differs in some significant aspects: CARP
has been designed to provide greater security and be protocol
independent (so we can support both IPv4 and IPv6). Finally, CARP allows
for some level of load balancing in addition to it's high-availability
functionality.

This is great work done by the OpenBSD folks in providing an alternative to Cisco’s patent #5,473,599 on Standby Router Protocol and it’s application to VRRP. OpenBSD might become a viable alternative to commercial firewall products for the enterprise that require certain features such as state table synchronization (OpenBSD’s pfsyncd) and clustering.

Permalink | October 18th, 2003

Comments are closed.