Load Balancing

[ramhussain]

Hello,

At my place of work, our main network has been going down a lot more frequently than before.  A friend of mine suggested that I can put our secondary Internet connection and connect it to our router and load balance it so the primary ISP has the default administrative distance and the secondary ISP has an administrative distance of 254 via IP route command.

Is there anything else to this that I need to watch out for when configuring our router with the above ip route command?  We have 8 sites that connect to a datacenter and I was thinking of doing this for all of our sites.  Anybody see anything wrong with this or could share their experiences if they've done anything like this is very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[mheick]

What you are describing in your post is different that what your title refers to. Load balancing refers the ability of two links to serve as points of connectivity that share the load of traffic. What you are describing is fault tolerance. Fault tolerance will allow the secondary link to take over when the primary link fails. Below I have included a link that might allow you to make the correct decision and increase the availability of your internet to your network.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk801/tk133/technologies_tech_note09186a008009457d.shtml