Wireless Bridge Load Balancing

[bblake]

Is it possible to configure two 1300 series bridges at one location, each handling a bridge link to another location to BOTH backup and load balance for each other should one of them fail?

[Richard Atkin]

Yes.

The 'best' way is to use a pair of routers and run them as routed links, each with the same link-cost metric, allowing you to do per-packet / per-connection load balancing.

Alternatively you could use Spanning tree, but that presumes you understand the load on each VLAN so you can prioritise which links enter a blocking / forwarding state for each VLAN.

HTH,

Richard

[bblake]

Thanks. It does point me in a direction. I'll likely use PVST, though I can't load balance. At least the link will be redundant.

[Sushil Kumar Katre]

Hi,

You can achieve this with quiet a few options -

1) Routing - You can configure the two routes with same AD to achieve Load Balancing and failover. Care should be taken be cause connectivity between router and bridge would be ethernet and if the radio link fails router would never come to know about this failure and will keep sending the traffic on the failed link. Usee SAA probes with ICMP to track the link failure.

2) You can configure etherchannel between two switches and achieve load balancing + failover.

>> Sushil

[BartJanssen]

Hi, at the moment I'm investigating how the set up an etherchannel with two 1300 bridges at each side of the road. With the etherchannel option the bridges between the switches need to be fully L2 and stp should be disabled. Has anyone a config example or some guidelines to do this?

Now , I'm reading here load balancing can also be achieved with routing. Very interesting!

Can somebody recommend one of the 2 options?

Thanks,

Bart

[jtolbert23]

I was curious what the recommendations were for this issue. I am dealing with it right now using 1200 series AP's.