Load Balancing and Failover in Dual Ethernet

[saravanandoss711]

I have a cisco 2911/K9 router with two 4Mbps Leased line connection from two different ISPs to my remote office. Remote office has cisco 2811 router

Main office has MPLS connection with static Ip routing apart from the two leased lines

All handoffs are ethernet

Is it possible to do load sharing as well as fail over between the two ISPs, if so how am i to achieve that

Kindly help me

[saravanandoss711]

I have the below IOS in my routers

cisco 2911/K9 with c2900-universalk9-mz.SPA.152-4.M3.bin

cisco 2811 with ipbase c2800nm-ipbase-mz.124-15.T9.bin

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Disclaimer

The  Author of this posting offers the information contained within this  posting without consideration and with the reader's understanding that  there's no implied or expressed suitability or fitness for any purpose.  Information provided is for informational purposes only and should not  be construed as rendering professional advice of any kind. Usage of this  posting's information is solely at reader's own risk.

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In  no event shall Author be liable for any damages whatsoever (including,  without limitation, damages for loss of use, data or profit) arising out  of the use or inability to use the posting's information even if Author  has been advised of the possibility of such damage.

Posting

Your topology, as described, isn't totally clear.  But if you have two paths that are p2p, and you statically route across them, do you have equal cost routes in your routing table now?  If so, the one issue you might have, failure within a path may not "down" a static route.  If not, you could use SLA tracking or you could switch to a dynamic routing protocol.

[saravanandoss711]

Joshep thanks for the reply.

Presently we have equal cost routes in the routing table

I am unable to find SLA Commands in both the routers

If we switch to dynamic routing protocol, can we use mixture of dynamic and static routing as my MPLS ISP is not supporting dynamic routing

can i choose bgp for dynamic routing?

can i have a sample configuration example

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Disclaimer

The   Author of this posting offers the information contained within this   posting without consideration and with the reader's understanding that   there's no implied or expressed suitability or fitness for any purpose.   Information provided is for informational purposes only and should not   be construed as rendering professional advice of any kind. Usage of  this  posting's information is solely at reader's own risk.

Liability Disclaimer

In   no event shall Author be liable for any damages whatsoever (including,   without limitation, damages for loss of use, data or profit) arising  out  of the use or inability to use the posting's information even if  Author  has been advised of the possibility of such damage.

Posting

If your MPLS vendor supports no dynamic routing, they why do you ask about BGP?  Or, do they only support dynamic routing with BGP?

You can do equal cost multi-path with BGP (may require a hidden command to fully utilize).

You could do GRE tunnels across the MPLS cloud and dynamically route between them using your choice of a dynamic routing protocol.

Both your devices should support OER/PfR (may require a feature upgrade).  OER/PfR will actually dynamically load balance.

SLA features should also be available on both your routers, those too might require a IOS feature upgrade.

Configuration examples might be found on Cisco's main web site.

[Reza Sharifi]

Most service providers hand off a layer-2 connection to you and don't use BGP for your site connectivity. They do however do BGP with you for Internet connectivity.  So, since you are connecting 2 sites together, you can simply run OSPF or EIGRP and since both links are Gig, you will have equal cost load balancing.

HTH

[saravanandoss711]

i asked about BGP bcoz i came across some sample configs using BGP.

My ISP supports only static routing for MPLS VPN

can i mix static and dynamic routing ie static routing for MPLS VPN and Dynamic for my p2p sites

in that case will i be able to route my p2p data to MPLS sites

[Jon Marshall]

can i mix static and dynamic routing ie static routing for MPLS VPN and Dynamic for my p2p sites

in that case will i be able to route my p2p data to MPLS sites.

Yes there is no problem with this. Just be aware that static routes will always be preferred over dynamic routes for the same destination nework with the same subnet mask so if you had a static route and a dynamic route to the same network the static would be preferred.

Also as previously mentioned, if you are using static routing then you may need to use IP SLA to do tracking.

Jon