Load sharing between two T1 Cicuits

[Kanwar]

Hi,

We have two T1 circuits.I would like to load share between the two circuits.I also have IP CEF enabled.

these are two different providers and we are not doing BGP at this point.I was wondering is there a way other then doing policy routing. If I put two default routes pointing to different next hops, would that work?. or is there a better way. thanks for your help.

[Richard Burts]

The most simple, most easy, most reliable, most low overhead way to load share outbound traffic is to have two default routes with one pointing to each provider.

Note that this will control outbound traffic. How traffic comes back to you will depend on things which your providers do and over which you have little or no control.

HTH

Rick

[Kanwar]

Thanks, so If i have ip cef enabled too would this means this would utilize both T1 lines. right now we are utlizing about 70 to 100% our main T1 line. so having Two T1 means we have 3 Mbits line. Also if we want to send based on vlans to the second T1 Line. is that possible too. Thanks for your help.

Kaiser

[Richard Burts · Accepted solution]

If you have CEF enabled and if you configure two default routes (one pointing at each T1) you should get load sharing on both circuits for outbound traffic. You will probably not get exactly 50-50 sharing but should get a good amount of traffic on each.

If you want to send out a particular T1 based on the VLAN that it came from, you should be able to configure Policy Based Routing and get this to work. This is a bit more complex and will have some more overhead than the two default routes. But if it will solve your requirements better, you should certainly be able to do it.

HTH

Rick

[Kanwar]

I have IP Cef enabled in the router. it is only a 2610XM and I think I will go with the default routes, I don't want put any load on the router by doing policy routing. If ip cef can do the job. I am happy. Thanks for your help.

Kaiser