Firewall Wizards mailing list archives
RE: Load Balancing using the Firewall
From: "Andrew J. Luca" <andrewluca () mediaone net>
Date: Thu, 9 Jul 1998 21:11:50 -0400
One of the options for this would be to install a router of your own in front of the ISP's routers. This would allow the same level of load balancing to occur without the ISP's running BGP or OSPF with you. You would still be able to install n+1 routers so that you could be comfortable with a level of redundancy. However, this will only provide round-robin type of load balancing (or slightly better) in most cases and is still sub-optimal. The best configuration that you can achieve is to run BGP with your provider. If you are dual-homed on the Internet, most providers of any reasonable size will configure BGP with you. I would suggest that you go back to your provider(s) and push harder. Usually they will charge some nominal fee ($1k-$3k) for the setup of the service but that is worth the extra level of performance and bandwidth usage that you would achieve. The other thing to note is that you would want to control the router(s) on which the BGP is run since these will need to be pretty beefy boxes (>64Mb memory, fast processor -- e.g. not a 250x router). This is an important consideration that most larger ISP's will have placed into their contracts before agreeing to run BGP with you. Just my thoughts. Drew -----Original Message----- From: owner-firewall-wizards () nfr net [mailto:owner-firewall-wizards () nfr net] On Behalf Of Diego P. Vasquez B. Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 1998 5:35 PM To: 'firewall-wizards () nfr net' Subject: Load Balancing using the Firewall Good Day. I'm new to the list so Hi! all. :) We have two internet connections to different ISPs and we are interested in implementing load balancing and fault tolerance. The ISPs themselves are reluctant to configure BGP or OSPF routing schemes for load balancing on the IP level, so now we're interested in a firewall product that will support load balancing and fault tolerance of both the firewall boxes as well as internet connection availability of the ISPs. Thank you in advance for the attention given to this request. _______________________________ Diego P. Vásquez B. dvasquez () marc-harris com IST The Firm of Marc M. Harris
Current thread:
- Load Balancing using the Firewall Diego P. Vasquez B. (Jul 08)
- RE: Load Balancing using the Firewall Andrew J. Luca (Jul 12)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Load Balancing using the Firewall Andrew Yeomans (Jul 12)
- Fwd:Load Balancing using the Firewall Harvey Nusz (Jul 12)
- FW: Load Balancing using the Firewall Diego P. Vasquez B. (Jul 14)
- RE: Load Balancing using the Firewall Andrew J. Luca (Jul 14)