Master election and failover

Each VSRP device advertises its VSRP priority in Hello messages. During Master election, the VSRP device with the highest priority for a given VRID becomes the Master for that VRID. After Master election, the Master sends Hello messages at regular intervals to inform the Backups that the Master is healthy.

If there is a tie for highest VSRP priority, the tie is resolved as follows:

• Layer 2 devices - The Layer 2 Switch with the higher management IP address becomes the Master.
  • Device with management IP addresses are preferred over switches without management IP addresses.
  • If neither of the switches has a management IP address, then the device with the higher MAC address becomes the Master. (VSRP compares the MAC addresses of the ports configured for the VRID, not the base MAC addresses of the devices.)
• Layer 3 devices - The Layer 3 device whose virtual routing interface has a higher IP address becomes the master.