Load Balancing HSRP on BGP

[sjg770]

I am trying to load balance 2 HSRP routers over BGP OSPF is not a option. Has anyone succesfully load balanced over BGP? Can it be done?

Shneur

[abahl]

Greetings,

Load balancing is not possible but load sharing is possible as BGP does not have facility for load balancing (because only the best route to the destination is plotted in the routing table).

You can configure two standby groups in HSRP.

One virtual route will have high priority for one Ethernet segment and the other virtual router will have high priority for the second Ethernet segment. Also you can track the status of serial links (EBGP), and configure the HSRP to reduce the priority of the virtual router in case the EBGP link goes down.

Even load balancing is not possible with HSRP, it also provides load sharing only.

But using BGP and HSRP together will provide you Hot Standby/Backup facility along with load sharing features.

For further details please refer to following documents:

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/459/hsrp_bgp.html

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/619/7.html

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/cisintwk/ics/cs009.htm#xtocid122333

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/619/6.html

I hope this will help you.

Anuj

[Gilles Dufour]

Are you trying to loadbalance incoming traffic or outgoing traffic ?

Is it eBGP or iBGP ?

Could you give us more detail about your scenario.

In some cases, loadbalancing can be done easily. However it's not always feasible. Morever, controlling incoming traffic is tricky.

[sjg770]

I am already load balancing the incoming traffic over OSPF. Pretty much I have a client who needs to justify the standby PVC to his internal accounting. To do that he needs to load BAL outgoing traffic. OSPF isn't an option because it is external OSPF routes and all the metrics is the same number.

There are 6 HSRP sites I am contemplating on editing those sites so that they are native Ospf routers and I will play with the Metrics

I was investigating the option of using BGP.

[ruwhite]

It doesn't sound like this relates to the bgp or ospf routing at all. Have you looked into using multiple hsrp groups to toss traffic from different hosts on the network towards different gateways? There are ways to load share the traffic between the two hsrp routers, then you would count on the routing to make the router which receives the traffic send it down the link which it's connected to--which is what is sound like is already happening.

Russ