# What's Virtual IP address?

 We already know about physical IP addresses which are assigned to actual physical machines to find them on the internet. An analogy can be that we have a home address to locate us, the same can say for machines also. Either we can use some domain ([abc.com](http://abc.com)) or direct IP addresses to access our servers.

Now comes beautiful virtual IPs.  Well, you will see the problem they solve with much simplicity. These VIPs (virtual IPs) are not directly related to any specific physical machine but can be used to access them dynamically. Let's see how. So till now, we had fixed IP which we use to access any machine, the normal way :) So then what's the need for this new thing? Why virtual IPs ?

Suppose you have some critical component in your system on which your whole feature/product might be dependent. What happens if that fails?  Let's take the example of a load balancer here as it's the entry point in your system.  You would spin up another machine and want to serve from that now.  But that machine would have a different physical IP address now. Now you will need to tell the client to use different IP. This is problematic, as you don't want to be dependent on your client. 

Here's the beauty of virtual IPs that comes into play. It helps in having high availability of your servers. So you will only give this virtual IP to your client and then when your server crashes/ fails this virtual IP can be quickly used by the new machine. That's it. you don't need to worry about such failures and navigate through such situations easily. Obviously, there are other ways to avoid these kinds of situations but this is much simpler. Take this with a grain of salt though, this floating IP pattern shouldn't be always used though. 

We will discuss the internals of this switchover in the next blog...