[afnog] Load Balancing Two ISP links

[Peter Nyamukusa]

Hi Mike/Noa,

When you talk about Load Balancing, the first thing that comes into my mind
is BGP because this gives you great control of your routing but the big
question to ask is do you have the  Resources.

Cheers,
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Peter Nyamukusa (MCSE, CCIP, A+, JNCIA-ER)
 
________________________________________
From: afnog-bounces at afnog.org [mailto:afnog-bounces at afnog.org] On Behalf Of
Mike Barnard
Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2007 4:54 PM
To: ncmaina2001 at yahoo.com
Cc: afnog at afnog.org
Subject: Re: [afnog] Load Balancing Two ISP links

Hi Noa,
I am also working on the same senario as we speak, however i would like to
share some few things with you. I also hope you are meaning load balancing
two upstream providers with a single Router. 
 
yes, i do mean load-balancing,  but i do want fail-over as well.

First, are you considering the CPU and I/O resources given the fact that you
are planiing to utilise a single Router for both links.One Single Router can
do this job if two WAN interfaces are installed on it.
 
Yes, i have considered CPU and I/O resources for this single router.

Just make sure each interface has its respective ip add from the specific
Provider and configure or add one "ip nat inside source ...." statement and
one default static route. After you've configured  the new interface. 

If NAT is not appropriate then you will need to consider setting static
routes pointing to each interface but rember to amke one parmanent.
 
It is NAT for sure...

Second, when i hear the word load balancing, some times i think of
redundancy and from the Cisco Implementation point of view, i would
Automatically suggest Two Routers and Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP) be
the protocol achieving this goal. 
 
Well, i have one router, with two links coming in from two different ISP's.

Hope this helps. Mine seems to work but i am still fine tuning it.
 
This does give me a pointer. This is what i have:
 
one router with two serial interfaces, each interface is configured with a
different IP address (of course) for each ISP link. Currently, i have two
routes
 
ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 A.B.C.E
ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 W.X.Y.Z
 
This unfortunately does not load balance and does not take into
consideration one link failing. What i am looking for is a way to have load
balancing and fail-over onthis router for these two links. 
 
Like i mentioned, i have looked at OER and it looks like what will work for
me, the catch here is that the deployment of OER requires at least two
routers. I was wondering if anyone has deployed OER on one router and has it
running and if they can give me some pointers. 
 
Thanks.
 
Regards
 

-- 
Mike

Of course, you might discount this possibility, but remember that one in
a million chances happen 99% of the time.
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