et lux in tenebris lucet

In the IPv4 world, router or gateway redundancy is accomplished using a protocol such as VRRP or HSRP. Many of these same routers support IPv6, but not the redundancy factor. Or do they? Fortunately in IPv6 land there’s a built-in feature in the protocol called “router advertisement”, or RA. A router with an IPv6 address on an interface will generate an RA for hosts on the same layer 2 segment. Using this feature, we can create a simple failover setup for IPv6 between two routers. In this example I’m using Cisco routers, but the same concept can be applied elsewhere.

The concept is extremely simple: configure the IPv6 address on both router interfaces as anycast (that is, disable duplicate address detection) and adjust the RA interval and lifetime parameters to your liking. The hosts will pick up the link local addresses from each router/gateway as a candidate default gateway. If one of them fails it will stop sending its respective RA.

The Cisco interface config commands to be applied to the router interfaces are:

ipv6 address 2001:0DB8:107:400::1/64 anycast
ipv6 nd ra-interval 60
ipv6 nd ra-lifetime 300


That’s it! Now you have a basic redundant IPv6 gateway. The obvious drawback to this is recovery time: the failed RA will have to time out on the hosts before it is removed from their routing table. However, you can adjust the RA lifetime on most platforms. This also requires that the hosts listen for RA (which may have implications on an end-user network such as rouge RA). The benefit is that in any case you’ll have simple redundancy using a protocol feature that you may otherwise not have.