RE: Load Balancing using the Firewall

["Andrew J. Luca" <andrewluca () mediaone net>]

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