Multi WAN Multi VPN Link & Bandwidth Aggrigation
-
We have 3 offices site-to-site linked with openvpn on pf 1.2.3-release boxes works well btw. Ironically the main office is the most rural and has limited bandwidth possibilities. I am trying to use the vpn connection for some applications that require a decent level of bandwidth overhead. My question is if the main office had two dsl connections lets say 3mb x 512k and they were load balanced in a multi-wan config could this improve data transfer speeds over the vpn? Could multiple vpn links be trunked or bound to make one faster connection? I got the basic model from this doc I found online. Any input would be gracious.
http://www.gouloum.fr/doc/multilink.html
/ <–VPN-1-on-link-1--> \
|--Main Office--| <-| <--VPN-2-on-link-2--> |-> |--Remote Office--|
\ <--VPN-3-on-link-3--> /
<----------------------->
aggregated link -
In theory that can work, but at the moment we don't have anything setup to stack a link aggregation protocol on top of OpenVPN.
As it is now, you can do redundancy that way, but not increase bandwidth.
-
I have a slightly different question, but I think it is related to this.
I want to bind together at least 2 (up to 5 or 6 if possible) entirely different connections (same ISP; two ISP accounts; two modems) and load balance. I'm trying to improve my bandwidth (avoid caps and maximize overall throughput) to the VPN service I use. Here's the question: Is it possible to load balance a single session of OpenVPN over two (or more) different connections? It gets slightly trickier, I need to run pfSense virtualized on Win7. I'm thinking of something like http://bora.bilg.in/blog/04/multi-wan-load-balancing-under-windows-with-pfsense, with a single session of OpenVPN load balanced. If it did work, it would go something like this:
Win7 with OpenVPN Client <–> Virtual PfSense with Load balancing <--> Connections 1, 2,...,n <--> VPN Server <--> Internet
Please note that I only have one VPN tunnel I want to make, I just want to expand the number of physical lines I can use to reach the server.
Is that even possible? Does the Server need to be setup in a special way? Should PfSense be running the OpenVPN client instead of Win7? If this is possible, are there any particular methods I need to use? What are they?