RE: Load Balancing using the Firewall

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

Exactly.  A couple of months ago, I got into a rather length discussion
which involved everything but round-robin.  Round robin will allow you to
push some traffic over each link.  However, I would still advocate using a
BGP configuration if you are dual-homed to the Internet.  Most ISP's would
prefer this also, since that can help to minimize some problems that occur
between ISP's when you mis-configure routing.

Drew

-----Original Message-----
From:   Diego P. Vasquez B. [mailto:dvasquez () marc-harris com]
Sent:   Monday, July 13, 1998 10:32 AM
To:     'firewall-wizards () nfr net'
Cc:     'Andrew J. Luca'
Subject:        FW: Load Balancing using the Firewall

Do you mean a router in the company's side of the ISPs routers?
How would I accomplish the load balancing of incoming traffic without
using BGP?  The outgoing traffic will be balanced by the router using
round-robin I assume.
BTW, thank you for your response.

> -----Original Message-----
> From:  Andrew J. Luca [SMTP:andrewluca () mediaone net]
> Sent:  Thursday, July 09, 1998 8:12 PM
> To:    Diego P. Vasquez B.; firewall-wizards () nfr net
> Subject:       RE: Load Balancing using the Firewall
>
> 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