Ensuring high availability, Load Balancing and router

redundancy with GLBP

By
Sysnetadmin.co.cc
GLBP stands for Gateway Load Balancing Protocol , and it’s been on the Cisco scene
for about two years. GLBP i s a router redundancy protocol introduced in Cisco IOS
version 12.2(14)S.

To give you an idea where GLBP fits into your network, let’s look at how it compares to
its competition. Two such protocols are Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) and
Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) . Both are router redundancy protocols
that are similar to GLBP.

GLBP and HSRP are both Cisco proprietary solutions, but VRRP is an open standard
based on RFC 3768. Of course, that means you’ll find HSRP and GLBP on Cisco
routers only and VRRP on almost all enterprise routers (including Cisco).

Since all three are router redundancy protocols, what differentiates GLBP from the rest?
With GLBP, all routers that are part of the group are available to forward packets. (In the
server world, we might call this an active/active cluster.) On the other hand, with HSRP
or VRRP, only one router forwards packets at a time, and the others are waiting in case
the primary goes down (an active/passive cluster).

Regardless of the approach, all three protocols provide this redundancy using a virtual IP
address that serves as the default gateway. The virtual IP address points to the primary or
secondary routers in the case of HSRP and VRRP or to the group of routers forwarding
traffic in the case of GLBP. (On a side note, while HSRP acts as an active/passive router
redundancy protocol by design, you can now use Multi group HSRP—MHSRP—to
perform load-sharing, much like GLBP does.)

In the GLBP world, however, there’s still an election between the multiple active routers
in the redundancy group. The router that wins that election becomes the active virtual
gateway (AVG). The AVG assigns virtual MAC addresses to the other routers in the
group, which are active virtual forwarders ( AVFs). GLBP routers communicate using the
multicast IP address 224.0.0.102 and UDP port 3222.

Now that you’ve got a basic understanding of GLBP, let’s look at a basic GLBP
configuration. If you’ve configured HSRP or VRRP before, you’ll find that this
configuration is very similar.
You can configure GLBP in Interface Configuration Mode. Here’s an example of a basic
configuration on a single router:

Router(config)# interface FastEthernet 0/0

Router(config-if)# ip address 10.1.1.5
Router(config-if)# glbp 1 ip 10.1.1.1
Router(config-if)# glbp 1 priority 150
Router(config-if)# glbp 1 authentication md5 key -string 0 MySecretPassword

Note: Cisco didn’t introduce GLBP MD5 authentication until Cisco IOS version
12.3(2)T.

The default priority for a GLBP router is 100 (just like HSRP). By setting the priority in
this configuration to 150, we give this router a higher priority than a router at the default
priority of 100. This should force the election of the router as AVG.

By default, GLBP uses round-robin load balancing for routers in the group. However,
you can change this by using the glbp 1 load-balancing command. This repeats the
above configuration on the other routers in the group, with varying priority. To check the
status of GLBP redundancy and configuration, you can use the show glbp command.