Data Center Applications of Association Between Direct Routes and a VRRP Group
Service Overview
A data center, used for service access and transmission, consists of many servers, disk arrays, security devices, and network devices that store and process a great number of services and applications. Firewalls are used to improve data security, and VRRP groups are configured to improve communication reliability. VRRP may cause user-to-network traffic and network-to-user traffic to travel along different paths, and as a result, the firewall may discard the network-to-user traffic because of path inconsistency. To address this problem, association between direct routes and a VRRP group must be configured.
Networking Description
Figure 1 shows a data center network. A server functions as a core service module in the data center. A VRRP group protects data exchanged between the server and core devices, improving service security. Firewalls are attached to devices in the VRRP group to improve network security.
Feature Deployment
The master device transmits server traffic to a core device. When the core device attempts to send traffic to the server, the traffic can only pass through a firewall attached to the master device. On the network shown in Figure 1, the server sends data destined for the core device through the master device, and the core device sends data destined for the server along a path that an Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) selects. The association between the direct routes and a VRRP group can be configured on switch A and switch B so that the IGP selects a route based on VRRP status. The IGP forwards core-device-to-server traffic over the same path as the one over which server-to-core-device traffic is transmitted, which prevents the firewall from discarding traffic.