Why do I need 3 gateway groups to get wan load balancing & failover
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In the various guides I've read, they show adding three gateway groups - 1 for load balancing (both tier 1), and 2 for fail over.
Why doesn't just one gateway group work (load balancing)? The instructions indicate that "when two gateways are on the same tier (e.g. Tier 1), they will load balance. This means that on a per-connection basis, connections are routed over each WAN in a round-robin manner. If any gateway on the same tier goes down, it is removed from use and the other gateways on the tier continue to operate normally."
It seems like this should cover the fail over requirements. Why do the instructions show adding fail over groups?
What am I missing?
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You only need one gateway group to make it work. The guides are just explaining you can go ahead and make multiple gateway groups for various things (failover / load balance) and switch them out as you wish to accomplish different goals. Creating the gateway groups doesn't actually do anything to the traffic until you apply them in the Firewall rules.
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So not only the three gateway groups are not needed, but also the three rules aren't needed either?
I'm asking this because I have the three gateway groups and the three rules, but no matter if both or just one WAN are working, only the first rule is triggered, the other two never gets traffic.
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So not only the three gateway groups are not needed, but also the three rules aren't needed either?
exactly. 1 rule / 1 group is probably all you need
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So why every tutorial about this always states that you have to create the three gateway groups and the three rules?
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Because they are covering all the bases.
You only need one failover group to get one failover behavior (ie WAN1 (Tier 1) to WAN2 (Tier 2)).
