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ROUTING · HIGH AVAILABILITY
HSRP Calculator
Calculate HSRP active and standby roles, account for tracked priority changes and generate the virtual MAC address for a group.
HSRP election
Router A
Router B
Virtual MAC & timers
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Initial | HSRP has not yet established a usable state. |
| Learn | Learning the virtual IP and waiting for information. |
| Listen | Monitoring the active and standby routers. |
| Speak | Participating in the election. |
| Standby | Ready to assume the active role. |
| Active | Forwarding traffic for the virtual IP/MAC. |
Cisco documentation commonly describes default HSRP hello and hold timers as 3 and 10 seconds. Timer values are configurable.
Engineering notes
HSRP provides first-hop redundancy. Hosts use a virtual IP address as their default gateway while one HSRP device is Active and another is Standby. Priority is used in the election; preemption controls whether a higher-priority device can take the Active role after it becomes eligible.
This calculator models a two-router election. Real deployments can include more members, object tracking, preemption delays, authentication, multiple HSRP groups and platform-specific behaviour.