Question

Difficulty: HardHigh Availability and Redundancy Concepts

Match each high-availability technology or operational mechanism on the left with its primary redundancy behavior on the right.

  • VRRP PreemptionEnables a higher-priority gateway router to reclaim the primary active role from a lower-priority backup router upon recovering from an outage.
  • Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation (mLAG)Allows a connected switch or server to aggregate physical links across two distinct upstream switches without triggering Spanning Tree Protocol loop prevention blocking.
  • Stateful Switchover (SSO)Continuously synchronizes control plane state and active hardware forwarding tables to a secondary supervisor module to maintain persistent sessions during chassis hardware failover.
  • Multipath I/O (MPIO)Provides server-level storage fault tolerance by dynamically managing multiple physical host bus adapter (HBA) pathways to redundant SAN storage controllers.

Answer

VRRP Preemption matches with reclaiming the active primary router role upon recovery; Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation (mLAG) matches with bundling links across two separate physical switches without STP blocking; Stateful Switchover (SSO) matches with synchronizing control plane state for seamless supervisor module failover; Multipath I/O (MPIO) matches with managing server-to-SAN storage hardware paths.
Each listed technology targets high availability at a distinct architectural layer: VRRP Preemption manages gateway node recovery, mLAG provides multi-switch Layer 2 link redundancy, Stateful Switchover (SSO) maintains internal chassis supervisor state, and Multipath I/O (MPIO) provides host-to-SAN storage layer failover.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze First Hop Redundancy Protocol (FHRP) behavior
Identify VRRP Preemption as the mechanism that forces a recovered router with higher priority to resume the Master role from the Backup router.
Preemption controls active node election in gateway redundancy when primary nodes recover.
2
Examine switch link aggregation mechanisms across dual chassis
Identify mLAG as the technology that terminates a single port-channel onto two separate physical switches while preventing Layer 2 loops.
Standard LACP requires single-switch termination; mLAG extends this across dual chassis.
3
Evaluate chassis controller and supervisor redundancy
Identify Stateful Switchover (SSO) as the process syncing control plane state between primary and secondary supervisors.
SSO prevents session drops during switch management board failures.
4
Differentiate network interface redundancy from host storage redundancy
Identify Multipath I/O (MPIO) as host OS software that provides failover and load distribution across redundant HBA-to-SAN paths.
MPIO targets storage network resiliency at the host OS layer.

Key Concept

High Availability and Redundancy Concepts across Network Infrastructure Layers
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