RV042 Load Balancing Question

[Mike Radler]

Hi,

I configured a RV042 to load balance 2 WANs. It appears to working well but I would like a 2nd opinion as to whether or not I chose the proper settings to accomplish the task.

1. WAN1(ISP1) is the existing internet connection(1.5mb T1). I have a block of static IPs with ISP1.

2. I added ISP2 to the RV042's WAN2 connection to increase bandwith (10mb). I only have one static IP on ISP2.

3. I want everyone on this router to use WAN2... well... almost everyone... for the most part.

4. I want to keep WAN1 active on this router because there will be periodic inbound connections using static IPs (from ISP1) that are setup with one-to-one NAT. I also have a voicemail system that needs to continue to use ISP1's email relay (SMTP,25).

Anyway, I was able get the outgoing traffic that had to remain on WAN1 working with protocol binding. In order to get the router to use WAN2 for pretty much everything else, I set it for load balancing and set "Max. Bandwidth provided by ISP"  for WAN1  up & down kbits/sec both to 32 (very low). I left the WAN2 up & down settings to the actual speed of WAN2.

The result is very low traffic on WAN1 and lots of traffic on WAN2 which is what I wanted. Did I do this right? Is there another preferred method to accomplish this.

Thank You for your opinion,

Mike

[jonatrod]

Hi Mike, thank you for using our forum, my name is Johnnatan I am part of the Small business Support community. I apologize for your inconvenience; in this case the load balancing is a protocol in charge to distribute the packets based on the destination address. Given two paths to the same network, in case of your RV042 you are not able to customize your load balancing per default your bandwidth will be 50% per WAN, so if you have two WAN with a very different BW is not going to be a good idea active load balancing, the only way to “customize” it is as you already said, using a protocol binding. I hope you find this answer useful,

*Please mark the question as Answered or rate it so other users can benefit from it"

Greetings,

Johnnatan Rodriguez Miranda.

Cisco Network Support Engineer.

[Mike Radler]

Hi Jonathan, Thank you for your reply.

I think I understand your response but the router did appear to reduce the traffic on WAN1 after I simply lowered the max bandwidth number for WAN1 to 32 kbits. I let the router run for a while and then checked Log\SystemStatistics. It seems to be putting most of the traffic on WAN2 (e.g. Total Bytes; WAN1=50987309,  WAN2=3193648373), even though the only 'protocol binding' I'm doing is to WAN1.

So, when you say "you are not able to customize your load balancing per default your bandwidth will be 50% per WAN";

Is that 50% of the total packets? -OR- a weighted distribution of the packets based on the calculated bandwith of the 2 WANs? -OR-  a weighted distribution of the packets based on the max bandwidth that I entered in the setup for the WANs?

Thanks,

Mike