Cisco route load balancing

[child of wonder]

Let me preface this that I am not a networking guy. However, we've been having an issue lately where our VPN connection to the Fed will get saturated as multiple users upload financial data across it around the same time each day.

We have one VPN connection to the Fed here at the data center and another link at a small secondary DC at another physical location. There is a 10Mb pipe between the primary and secondary DC for failover.

My question is this:

Is there a way on our core router to randomly route users going through the Fed VPN down to the link at the secondary location instead of always using the first? I've seen some info online about doing this on a per packet basis but I'm looking more for a solution like DNS Round Robin where one user will get route A that will put them through the primary DC VPN while the next user would get route B which would put them through the secondary DC VPN.

EDIT:

Forgot to mention our core router is a 3604 and we're using BGP for a routing protocol.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Im not 100% sure, but I just got back from CCNA boot camp and was told that BGP does not do load balancing

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tec...09186a00800945bf.shtml

I'll wait for spidey or one of the other more qualified members for the real answer

 

[drebo]

CEF per destination might be the simplest way to do what you're looking for.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/pro...e09186a00800afeb7.html

 

[spidey07]

policy based routing would be very useful as well. Equal cost routing multipath would achieve load balancing as well - essentially you would have two or more routes to the same destination with the same metric or cost.

The equal cost would do what you want but you'd have to manipulate BGP metrics to do so. What I'm gathering is you have two paths to the FED destination network, and the VPN path is the best but you want to use the other one as well.

 

[child of wonder]

They're both VPN connections but the users spam the hell out of it around the same time each day. We'd like them to stagger their runs but getting multiple people in multiple physical locations to coordinate like that and follow through is proving impossible.

So what we're looking for is when a user opens their browser to http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (IP of Fed website) which has to go through the VPN, we'd like the user to randomly go through either the VPN at our primary DC or the VPN at our secondary DC.

Just like how when a round robin DNS entry is set someone can point their browser to someplace.somedomain.com and it will randomly resolve to either IP1 or IP2. However, in this case, the router will randomly send their HTTP connection over one route or another. Not on a packet basis but on a connection basis.

Does that make sense?

 

[jlazzaro]

how is your BGP setup? default routes, partial tables?

the default behavior of CEF (per-destination) load balancing with 2 equal cost routes is probobly your best solution. your exact implementation is going to depend on your current setup, which you havent provided much information for.