Anyone have experience with inbound load balancing or failover?

[geezlouise14]

Want to use two WAN links to ensure that customers can always get to our web services. Ideally, instead of simple failover, i'd like to do load balancing so inbound traffic takes advantage of both WAN links
I understand that some solutions use authoritative DNS to point the Internet to one port or the other. Any specific product recommendations?

I've briefly looked at xincom, edimax, draytek, and peplink brands.

Thanks!

 

[Jamsan]

I'm not familiar with any of the brands you've recommended, but here are some I've dealt with: F5 Link Controller, Radware LinkProof, Fat Pipe WARP and the like. All of these devices are usually very price (starting @ 10K on the low end), and they're usually deployed in pairs for high availability.

 

[stevech]

I use Cradlepoint's routers that fail-over to cellular 3G or 4G.

 

[spidey07]

What kind of WAN links? Normally you would use a routing protocol to maintain reachability to a common network and then use a dedicated load balancer for host redundancy.

 

[Jamsan]

What kind of WAN links? Normally you would use a routing protocol to maintain reachability to a common network and then use a dedicated load balancer for host redundancy.

That's normally the case, but many businesses don't have the expertise or want to be the expense for a Tier 1 provider that supports BGP across multiple vendors. These types of solutions allow for much more inexpensive backup providers (Tier 1 as a primary, business coax or similar as a backup solution).

 

[Emulex]

that is why you host it somewhere with many peering point connections.

BGP4 10/10 is about $895 from comcast with an SLA (not comcast business which is best effort) you'd need a secondary bgp4 connection for backup and routable ip's. This is not easy these days. easier to setup a box at colo and let them deal with it.

i use the edimax/xincom style routers they are pretty weak in power. you could build a pfsense box (vm) or two and do the same i spose with dynamic dns but you still need a host that is reliable for the dynamic dns so you might as well just shove it somewhere in the "cloud" lol

 

[geezlouise14]

Thanks for the responses. To clarify, i'm looking to use non-dedicated internet access from two different providers (cable and dsl). combined with a router that can handle inbound load balancing/failover, i hope to avoid situations where clients cannot connect to our services if one line goes down.

colocation not financially feasible at the moment.

 

[drebo]

You're pretty much SOL then for inbound loadbalancing.

Failover might be a possibility, but it's not going to be automatic (you'll have to change your DNS entries yourself when one of the connections goes down).

A load balancer can help with server redundancy, but it's not going to help at all with WAN redundancy.

Have you looked at a VPS solution, maybe?

 

[freegeeks]

1)request your own ip address space from your RIR (PI range - provider independant)
2)find at least 2 different providers that let you bgp peer and route your address space upstream

for loadbalacing between hosts, you will need a box like a F5 Big IP or use open source apache loadbalacing

 

[Jamsan]

Load balancers do exist for WAN redundancy. It's nothing different than what drebo recommended (changing DNS entries yourself to backup provider), but in an automated and load balanced fashion.

The F5 Big-IP Link Controller module works by being the authoritative source of your domain. It gives short TTL values to all DNS lookups (< 5 minutes), and hands out the appropriate IP based on several conditions - load based, up/down, etc. If one ISP goes down, any new DNS requests will no longer be replied with the IP of the failed ISP. Now, this is not 100&#37; fool proof, as many DNS caching servers will ignore the low TTL, but it should work for 80-90% of your customers out there. If you need higher availability than that, then you'll need shell out more for a BGP type solution or a colo with BGP already in place (neither solution is very cost effective compared to a Big-IP type solution).

http://www.f5.com/pdf/products/big-ip-link-controller-overview.pdf

 

[geezlouise14]

Jamsan, thanks, but $16k for Big-IP is about $15k more than I want to spend.

Anyone have good experience with cheaper ones? I know Emulex has recommended xincom and edimax. If i'm willing to spend more, is there a next tier of products above these but well below F5?

 

[Jamsan]

Jamsan, thanks, but $16k for Big-IP is about $15k more than I want to spend.

Anyone have good experience with cheaper ones? I know Emulex has recommended xincom and edimax. If i'm willing to spend more, is there a next tier of products above these but well below F5?

I did mention they weren't cheap .

Radware Linkproof's are about 10K IIRC. I believe the Fat Pipe WARP product is even less - Maybe around 7K or so.

Don't have any experience with the other products you mentioned, sorry.

 

[drebo]

Barracuda's Link balancer is available, too, but you're not going to find one in your budget. The Barracuda device is available for $1500, but you have lots of licensing with it.

Depending on the service you need, you could build a linux box to do it, but I wouldn't recommend it.