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Failover and Load-Balancing

Hamidsattarrana
Level 1
Level 1

Hi All!

I have 2 ISPs. I want to do Failover and Load Balancing via some Routing protocols like EIGRP or OSPF.

How can I acompolish that?

 

 

Thanks in Advance

6 Replies 6

marce1000
VIP
VIP

 

 - You may find this info useful :

             https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/border-gateway-protocol-bgp/5212-46.html

 M.



-- Each morning when I wake up and look into the mirror I always say ' Why am I so brilliant ? '
    When the mirror will then always repond to me with ' The only thing that exceeds your brilliance is your beauty! '

Joseph W. Doherty
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

Generally, you don't "do" EIGRP or OSPF with ISPs.

Do you have something in place now where you want to "add" failover and load balancing, or this is something from scratch?

Hi!

We have 2 ISPs. They are terminating into Switch and then into router via Sub-Interfaces. And I want to configure failover and load-balancing for our LAN network. If 1 ISP goes down all traffic should go via 2nd ISP. We are using 192.168.32.0/22 for LAN Network.

 

 

Thanks

 

As Rick asks, what kind of public addressing do you have with your ISPs?

Assuming you have something like a only a single public IPs, or very small public network prefix blocks, and further assuming they differ across ISPs, a most common setup would just use a default static route to each ISP.  That would round robin flows, but not care about actual bandwidth usage.  I.e. you load share, but real load balancing is hit or miss, though, likely both links would be used.

For failure, using static default routes, you would need to setup SLA monitoring to the next hop for each.  Failure of a SLA response would have the router stop using that path (until the SLA works again).  During such a failure, assuming, again, each ISP is different IP networks, "in flight" flows, on the lost path, will "break".

As Rick mentions, if you get into dynamic routing with an ISP, they likely will want to use BGP.  Some can, as Rick also mentions, support another dynamic routing protocol, but that's, I believe still (?) a bit unusual for ISPs.

As Rick also mentions BGP also supports multiple paths, but, if I remember correctly, not for different BGP ASs (unless you use a "hidden" command).  Regardless, most routing protocols, although they will "automatically" deal with failover, also round robin flows.  EIGRP does, I recall (?), have the capability to dynamically load balance, but I also recall (?) using it isn't recommended.  (Better for something like that would be to use something like Cisco's PfR for such dynamic load balancing.)

If we remove the reference to particular routing protocols then this is a reasonable beginner question: how to do failover and load balancing with 2 ISP. There are many things about this environment that we do not know and which could influence the advice that we would give. These include:

- is this a single router connected to 2 ISP? Or are there 2 routers, each of which connects to one ISP? Or is it possible that there are 2 routers and at least one of the ISP has connections to both routers?

- what address space does the original poster have to work with? Can we assume that the network is using private address space? Do you have Public IP assigned to you by either, or both, of the ISP? Has the ISP assigned just a single Public IP to be used for the connection to the ISP? Or has either ISP assigned some additional IP address(es) that you can use for address translation?

- does all of the Internet traffic originate inside the network, go to the Internet, and response comes back, or are there some resources inside the network that must be reachable from the Internet (perhaps a server where traffic from Internet comes to the network, to the server, and server response goes to the Internet)?

Based on the limited information we have so far, here are my suggestions.

Failover is pretty easy. Run some dynamic routing protocol with both ISP. As Joseph has indicated with ISP the dynamic routing protocol is generally BGP. But there might be some circumstances where you might run OSPF or EIGRP. There are ways to achieve failover with static routes, but dynamic routing is easier and the original post did establish an expectation of dynamic routing. So that is what I will follow. When you run a dynamic routing protocol then your router(s) establish a neighbor relationship with each ISP. As long as the neighbor relationship is still working then you learn routes from both ISP (particularly learn a default route) and traffic might use both links. If one ISP goes down then the neighbor relationship goes down and any routes related to that neighbor are removed from the routing table and all traffic uses the surviving ISP.

The discussion of load balancing is much more complicated. When we are discussing Internet traffic on more than one interface it is helpful to consider separately how you send traffic to the Internet and how the Internet sends traffic to you. 

So let us look at alternatives for how you would send traffic to the Internet. A major consideration is what does the ISP advertise to you? Let us start simple and assume that each ISP will advertise a default route to you (which is the case for many small organizations using 2 ISP). The first challenge is that if you are using BGP as the dynamic routing protocol the default behavior is for BGP to choose a single path. To achieve load balancing you would need to configure BGP to accept multiple equal cost paths. Or you could achieve load balancing by having one ISP advertise a default just a default route while the other ISP advertisees a default route (needed for failover) and also advertises more specific prefixes. You would route to the networks with more specific prefixes through that ISP and use the default route from the other ISP to achieve load balancing.

There are other alternatives which we could discuss if we need a complete discussion. But they get increasingly complex and I believe that what I suggest so far is a good beginning.

HTH

Rick

Hello
Presently how are you connecting to these two ISP's, It sounds like a single router interconnected via a L2 switch?
- What kind of routing are your running- Dynamic or Static?
- Do you have network translation
-Do you want to provide load balance and resiliency?
-What type of the ISP connectivity service do you have, Are they the same ,Do they have the same committed data rate?


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Paul
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