Load balancing for 8 WAN connections

rocky

Hello,

Due to some special conditions at my office, I need a load balancer for 8 wan connections. As a normal PC often has at most 2 conventional PCI slot, I will buy two adapter Intel I340 (http://tinyurl.com/3eo2358) that would work as 8 NICs. (The module for this adapter can be compiled as mentioned in some threads of the forum.)

8 WAN connections –> 2 adapters Intel I340 --> pfsense as load balancer

I've searched and I see that most documents mention setting up a load balancer for 2 WAN connections. I don't think that my case is similar to known problem, as fail-over setup is more complex.

Any ideas?

Thank you for your reading and helps.

dhatz

You don't need 8 physical Ethernet ports. You can use VLANs on just one Ethernet port of your pfSense router to connect to all 8 WAN ADSL/cable modems.

rocky

@dhatz:

You don't need 8 physical Ethernet ports. You can use VLANs on just one Ethernet port of your pfSense router to connect to all 8 WAN ADSL/cable modems.

Thank you for your reply.

I am sorry if I made any confusion. In my office, I have 8 (physical) fiber cables, so I just think of 8 ethernet ports (or 2 adapter Intel I340).

Another problem is that: in the dual-wan documents, the setup is as below

1 load balancer for 2 wans A, B
1 fail-over (when A is up, B is down)
1 fail-over (when A is down, B is up)

If I have 8 wans A1, A2,… A8, how can I set up fail-over links?

Thanks again

ptt

Check the Docs

http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Multi-WAN_2.0

hint: read the "Tiers" part

GruensFroeschli

You really don't need 8 ethernet ports.

Get a VLAN capable switch, add 8 VLANs on the pfSense and multiplex your 8 incoming connections.
–> For the pfSense it looks like 8 different interfaces (each VLAN is seen as a interface), but you don't actually need that many NICs.

rocky

Thank you (GruensFroeschli, ptt and dhatz) very much. I will try with your helps, and will give feedback when I am done :)

rocky

@GruensFroeschli:

You really don't need 8 ethernet ports.

Get a VLAN capable switch, add 8 VLANs on the pfSense and multiplex your 8 incoming connections.
–> For the pfSense it looks like 8 different interfaces (each VLAN is seen as a interface), but you don't actually need that many NICs.

I am not familiar with VLAN technique. I intend to buy the switch "HP ProCurve Switch 1700-8 (P/N: J9079A)" which supports "IEEE 802.1Q VLANs". Is that possible to use it with pfSense?

Thanks

Metu69salemi

I'm not 100% sure that this switch performs well, but IEEE802.1Q tagging is the guideline you should follow

cheesyboofs

@rocky:

I am not familiar with VLAN technique. I intend to buy the switch "HP ProCurve Switch 1700-8 (P/N: J9079A)" which supports "IEEE 802.1Q VLANs". Is that possible to use it with pfSense?

Thanks

I learnt the hard way about the switch to vLAN's and posted here http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,11913.0.html so others wouldn't have too.
If you have a spare morning give it a read.
Funny to read back on old posts now and again.

cheers

jasonlitka

Also, last time I checked, the 82580-based cards didn't work in pfSense unless you manually compiled the driver and copied it to your system.

regis

The switch you want to buy is an 8 port switch, so you'll lack one port (you need 8 ports for your 8 fiber adapters plus one port for your pfSense box)

I would recommend a J9450A which is a 24 port gigabit switch (if you load balance 8 WAN, you'll need more than 100mbit on the pfsense port)

vito

not to complicate this more for you, but you many also want to get two switches and split the 8 lines.
Both switches would have 4 lines and 1 pf port (pf port running vlans)

That may give you a little more redundancy at the switch level.