Re: Highly Available OSPF Router.

[Joris Dobbelsteen <joris.dobbelsteen at MAIL.COM>]

Mukesh,

I believe such an implementation would not require an WG standard. There are
numberous techniques available for creating high-availability/load-balancing
clusters, both hardware and software. It is up to an implementators of an
OSPF router (and other routing protocols as well) to ensure the state of the
router is shared between the clusters, conforming to the standard of a
single router.
The use of a intra-cluster communication protocol would be useless, as
different implementations use different structures and might have states
defined differently. This would not allow them to share state efficiently,
if at all possible.

Next I believe this idea is of little use with OSPF. A much simpler and
elegant solution is available: two OSPF routers. Let OSPF take care of
selecting the router which is available, rather than HA/LB
hardware/software. This works just as well, because OSPF is designed for
this task.

- Joris

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Mailing List [mailto:OSPF at PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM] On
>Behalf Of Mukesh.Gupta at NOKIA.COM
>Sent: Monday, 16 February 2004 8:03
>To: OSPF at PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM
>Subject: Highly Available OSPF Router.
>
>Has anyone implemented an OSPF HA where two or more OSPF
>routers appear as one OSPF router to the OSPF neighbors. One
>of the routers (the Master) talks to the external world (OSPF
>neighbors) and the others (the Backups) keep all the dynamic
>OSPF state (neighbors, database etc) in sync with the Master.
>When the Master dies, one of the backup router takes over
>immediately without the neighbors realizing any change in the network ?
>
>If anyone has implemented any such thing, I would like to hear
>about how they do it. I would also like to know if the WG
>would be interested in standardizing such a mechanism ? At
>least I think that it will be a useful thing !!
>
>Regards
>Mukesh
>