an address brought up in addition to the base address of systems in the cluster

an address that is in DNS and most likely has a domain name

an IP address bound to a virtual interface which provides fault-tolerant access to multihomed servers with multiple NICs and configured on multiple networks

In a cold failover cluster configuration, each physical node has its own physical IP address and physical host name. To present a single system image to the outside world, the cluster uses a dynamic IP address that can be moved to any physical node in the cluster. This is called the virtual IP address.

An IP address that is shared among the hosts of a Network Load Balancing cluster. A Network Load Balancing cluster might also use multiple virtual IP addresses, for example, in a cluster of multihomed Web servers. See also: host; multihomed computer; IP address

A virtual IP address (VIP) is an IP address that is not connected to a specific computer or network interface card (NIC) on a computer. Incoming packets are sent to the VIP address, but all packets travel through real network interfaces.