CCNA Lab 5: First Hop Redundancy Protocols - High Availability Gateway with Cisco HSRP
A single default gateway represents a critical single point of failure in enterprise access layer networks. If a primary router loses power, suffers a link failure, or reboots, end hosts remain isolated from external subnets, even if a physical backup router is online and connected to the same switch. First Hop Redundancy Protocols (FHRP) solve this by allowing multiple physical routers to share a single Virtual IP (VIP) and Virtual MAC address. Hosts target the Virtual IP as their default gateway, ensuring transparent, automatic failover without requiring IP reconfiguration or ARP table flushes on client devices. ...