Multi-Site Network Layout

[ronald.lawrimore]

Can anyone help me out with this question. I am talking to an ISP about connecting three sites back to a central site for Internet Access.

We want all the Internet traffic to flow through the main site for provisioning of that traffic for QOS on the fly as needed. All site would have 100mb connections.

This would be setup not using MPLS. Can someone share a diagram as to what that might look like with 2 branches and one hub site.

I am not sure as what equipment would be needed to make this happen at each of the sites(currently on switches).

Thanks for any help.

[jj27 · Accepted solution]

Without doing some sort of MPLS connection I would think that you're limited to point-to-point networks or VPNs which tunnel all traffic to the central site.  Is there an option to have a 100mb circuit with a carrier at each location which terminates at the central site?

[ronald.lawrimore]

We can do MPLS, but we want to make sure all traffic flows to the hub site so we can put a WAN Optimizer such as a Packeteer, to control the traffic QOS internally without having to go through the ISP to control the flow.

I'm assuming this can be done.

[jj27]

I don't see why not.  I am not familiar with the WAN optimizer you are referring to, but as far as routing is concerned you would simply advertise your default route (0.0.0.0/0) out of the hub site and all traffic at your branches would go there for internet access.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

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Posting

You can easily have tunnels across the Internet, so logically connect your branch networks to your hub's networks.  However, when working with logical multipoint, to have really effective QoS you need to either control QoS configurations at WAN cloud egress (often happens with MPLS, generally not available for Internet) or you need to control bandwidth between your sites.

For example, suppose two branches sent a 100 Mbps of traffic to your hub.  You would have congestion at cloud egress to your hub (also assuming its connection is also 100 Mbps).  Without QoS control egress to the hub, you need to shape both branches so their aggregate doesn't exceed 100 Mbps.  Could be 50:50, 75:25, 90:10, etc.  This insure any congestion will be seen as the branch outbound shaper, where you can manage QoS.

Keep in mind, if desire to share the Internet link for "native" Internet access, you're back to losing bandwidth management.  Simple solution, use a different Internet link for "native" Internet access.

PS:

In a later posting, you mention using a WAN optimizer, such as Packeteer.  Such appliances can do some "niffty" things, but even their best downstream bandwidth management isn't as good as upstream bandwidth management.