Need help picking right fail over solution

[#1]

Hey guys,

I'm designing a new network for one of our customers and the customer requirements for fail over is a little more difficult than what I'm used to. In the picture shown, I'm feeding the site with two paths coming from different DC's which connects into ME-3400E Layer 3 switches (with advanced IP license installed).  The customer is asking for as much redundancy as we can do in the event or either hardware failure and/or link failure.

The customer is asking for:

• Fast / Instant fail over from Primary and Secondary path
• If primary path goes down that traffic still goes to Switch 1 through to Switch 2 through then down Secondary Path
• That HSRP is provided between their two firewalls and my two layer 3 switches

My idea is using EIGRP to manage the fail over and just wanted to get peoples feels for what would be best in this type of network? I'm thinking with the 2nd dot point above is going to be hard to implement but i do have limited EIGRP knowledge around this kind of setup.

My question to you, is EIGRP the right networking protocol and any tips to get this right to the customers requirements?

[nazimkha]

Hi,

There could be plenty of options to design this network.

I am not sure the capabilities of the existing switch but if you want to stay with HSRP I can think of :

BFD with HSRP for fast failover. 

HSRP load balancing by using separate groups

Object-tracking.

Aggressive timers, preempt, priorities

Routing protocol (OSPF, EIGRP) with BFD will help to get msec failover.

Regards,

Nazim