A distributed data center topology having at least a pair of active data centers that can recover from a disaster at one of the data centers and achieves load balancing using IGP (Interior Gateway Protocol) between data centers. The distributed data centers use virtual IP addresses, route health injection and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for business continuance, disaster recovery and load balancing. The active/active topology supports load balancing where each site concurrently hosts active applications or applications can be hosted in a logical active/standby mode. IGP and RHI (Route Health Injection) are used to propagate routes to an edge router and BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) and IP Anycast are used for site-to-site recovery and load balancing between data center sites.