Patent ID: 9019813
Filing Date: 2015-04-28
Classification: H04L

Abstract:
1. A networking system, comprising: a first networking switch positioned at a boundary between Layer-2 (L2) and Layer-3 (L3), the first networking switch comprising a first virtual router redundancy protocol (VRRP) module; a second networking switch connected to the first networking switch via an interswitch link (ISL), the second networking switch being positioned at the boundary between L2 and L3 and comprising a second VRRP module; and an access switch positioned in L2, the access switch being configured to be connected to the first and second networking switches in a virtual link aggregation (vLAG), wherein the first VRRP module is configured to perform active internet protocol (IP) forwarding when the second networking switch is not performing active IP forwarding, and wherein the second VRRP module is configured to perform active IP forwarding when the first networking switch is not performing active IP forwarding, wherein each of the first and second VRRP modules are configured to indicate status of their respective switch associated with VRRP to each other via the ISL, and wherein the statuses comprise: initialization when a switch is not currently active (INIT), back-up status (BACK-UP), and master status (MASTER), wherein each of the first and second networking switches are configured to: when a transition from the INIT state to a local switch active (LOCAL-UP) state is detected and when a virtual router instance over the vLAG has the BACK-UP status, set up active IP forwarding such that any address resolution protocol (ARP) requests are responded to.