DUAL WAN routers

[LS20]

I have 2 T1 lines and would like to feed them both to ~100 users


T1 -> T1 router -> Dual-Wan router WAN port #1
T1 -> T1 router -> Dual-Wan router WAN port #2

Dual-wan router LAN port #1 -> 24-port switch... daisy chain switches together


so that's the set-up. does anybody know load-balancing features of the Xincom and Hawking?

Xincom
Hawking


Xincom says that the load balancing is outbound only? anybody sure about this? how exactly does the balancing by 'bytes, packet, & session' work?
ie any packets over a certain size uses #1 WAN and other packets use #2?
and session balancing is 50 computers use #1 WAN and 50 computers use #2 WAN?

the Hawking doesnt even really explicitly defines its load balancing.

lastly, are there other routers out there like this?

 

[Boscoh]

FortiNet and SonicWall come to mind.

And of course, Cisco.

 

[LS20]

anybody know how the load balancing differ between these (including the fortinet and sonicwall) routers?

 

[Garion]

Not sure about the load balancing methods, but, by definition, this kind of thing does outbound load balancing only. The router itself has two separate IP addresses on the outside, one for each of it's Internet connections. When a server on the outside initiates a connection to the router, it's going to use only one of the IP's.

On outbound connections, the router gets to look at the traffic on the two circuits and pick the least busy one (or however you have the load balancing setup).

- G

 

[wseyller]

This router will not combine two internet connections to get double bandwidth. It only provide redundency in case one connection fails.

 

[wseyller]

also even if does provide double two connections together your ISP would have to support it and would have to provide a service to combine the each connection into one.

 

[Garion]

Originally posted by: wseyller
also even if does provide double two connections together your ISP would have to support it and would have to provide a service to combine the each connection into one.

That is, unfortunately, incorrect. These routers work by looking at the outbound network connections initiated from the inside. As each connection is initiated, the router looks at the useage of the two connections and sends it to one of them, based on some kind of load balancing algorythm. It's not perfect, but it works decently well, especially for multiple downloads.

- G

 

[LS20]

-not looking to "double" bandwidth for a single user/terminal/job
-ditto garion

if it'll efficiently do dynamic balancing ill be happy.. i dont wanna have to explicitly define loads/tasks for each connection that'll end up not being 'balanced'

 

[Tazanator]

only things I know to do that are cisco and imagestream routers ... pretty tall job for a router really.

 

[wseyller]

Originally posted by: Garion

Originally posted by: wseyller
also even if does provide double two connections together your ISP would have to support it and would have to provide a service to combine the each connection into one.

That is, unfortunately, incorrect. These routers work by looking at the outbound network connections initiated from the inside. As each connection is initiated, the router looks at the useage of the two connections and sends it to one of them, based on some kind of load balancing algorythm. It's not perfect, but it works decently well, especially for multiple downloads.

- G

Thanks for the update. Some people told me wrong I guess.