Load Balancing T1's

That is something I will take into consideration. I am still torn between CEF and MTL PPP. I have three networks that will have this set up. They will each have two T1's... no more, no less. I don't forsee us adding any more T1's in any of these situations. The cost for a Point-to-Point T1 across the Cascade mountains in high enough that if we were going to add a third, I would find a different solution.

I have read the paper the Chris recommended and have a much better understanding between the two software load-balancing options.

I am still having difficulty making a decision as to which method to use. I suppose I could set up both methods and measure my performance across each link. I guess there are so many variables that it makes it difficult for others to tell me which would be the wiser decision.

we've used both methods where I work, and I prefer to stay away from the multilink, simply for the troubleshooting aspect. Both work, however.

If i undestand what you need it may be this link can help you see for this features in stonegate FW

www.stonesoft.com/products/ISP_Multi-homing/


And in this way you can use differents ISP and different support of transmistion .

And is so easy to setup and troubleshooting .

I think I am going to go with CEF. MTL PPP just doesn't offer any advantages over CEF that I can see. It does look easier to manage since you are dealing with one link layer interface, but I don't have many interfaces the worry about.

We'll see how it goes. Thanks for the help.

Chaouki,

I appreciate the link but that is not what we are looking for. These are for internal point-to-point links. Basically, a few copper wires connected between two routers. Quite simply, all these links need to do is route IP traffic between two buildings.

I guess the site you linked to offers the same thing in theory but I already have Cisco routers with WIC's ready to go. And, for two of the three links, I'm not dealing with an ISP.

the beauty about it all is that if the CEF solution doesn't work out for you, you can always reconfigure them into the Multilink group.

I just got done reading that whole cisco article, and I wasn't aware that you could setup the multilink to allow dynamic circuit membership based on keep-alives - that's kinda cool.

And the benefits of multilink are that it's transparent to any of the Layer 3 protocols you're going to run across it, so if you're doing anything like QoS you won't have to worry about configuring that for each link. And that it also handles the fragmentation and reassembly of the packets and deals with out of sequence issues if one of the circuits happens to perform better or worse than the other. With basic load balancing, if you start getting out of sequence packets, they will just have to be retransmitted, causing a slight performance hit and some wasted bandwidth.

Good luck with your setup!