hsrp is cisco proprietary while vrrp is industry standard. their major difference would be their timers. hsrp uses a default hello timer of 3 seconds and a hold timer of 10 seconds. on the other hand, vrrp has faster timers with a hello of 1 second and a hold timer of 3 seconds. although you could tweak hsrp timers to make it feel like you're running vrrp. if you're using cisco devices, i would recommend glbp, which adds load balancing.

Hello Anita,

VRRP is standards based and can be used in a multivendor environment.

HSRP is Cisco proprietary.

see

for VRRP

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/ipapp/configuration/guide/ipapp_vrrp_ps6350_TSD_Products_Configuration_Guide_Chapter.html#wp1054602

for HSRP

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/ipapp/configuration/guide/ipapp_hsrp_ps6350_TSD_Products_Configuration_Guide_Chapter.html

You may be interested in GLBP that allows for real load balancing.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/ipapp/configuration/guide/ipapp_glbp_ps6350_TSD_Products_Configuration_Guide_Chapter.html

To be noticed that in the list of features of VRRP the load balancing capability is listed but I don't understand if it says that using multiple VRRP virtual routers is the way to do it.

My understanding is that HSRP and VRRP are now comparable and that GLBP provides effective load balacing.

Also in 12.4 is present object tracking that was missing for VRRP when it was introduced in Cisco IOS.

HSRP can emulate load sharing using multiple groups in the same subnet. And VRRP can do the same.

There are scenarios where HSRP or VRRP are a better choice when you want to implement redundancy without load balancing.

Hope to help

Giuseppe