Load balancing, failover and QoS at the same time?
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I have a little challenge… At a small hotel, I have this setup:
2 WAN - each is a DSL line at 1 Mbit (Yeah - "Rural" Brazil does not have really high speed....)
2 LAN - one for the front desk/employees, the other for the wireless routers that covers the hotel.
Here is my challenge:
I would love to use load balancing for the guests at the hotel - LAN1, BUT - as I have heard there can be problems with certain protocols, I need to exclude those, so that guests using them do not get into trouble.
The front desk (LAN2) do not need load balancing, but failover would be good. That part is easy. I think I have it covered. BUT - no matter how hard the guests hit the lines, the front desk should always have a little bandwith left - 350 kb would be enough to cover the important stuff.
So how do I set this up?
I know how to do the load balancing - grouping the WAN's with the same weight. But how to make sure it does not create problems with https etc?
I think I got the failover covered - a group of the WAN's with different weight. But how to make sure that there is always a minimum of bandwith left for LAN2?
I am sorry if the explanation is not clear. Tell me what more info is needed, and I will try to explain.
This could probably have been posted elswhere as well, but I am running 2.0 rc1, so I thought it is better here.
UPDATE
So far, I have enabled failover for LAN2 and load balancing for LAN1.
This should mean that whatever the front desk of the hotel is doing (LAN2) they will be ok as they are using WAN2. But if WAN2 fails, they should be pushed to WAN1.
For the customers that are on LAN1, they should now have twice as much bandwith as the load balancing is on. I checked the traffic graphs, and it seems like it is working.
BUT - I do not have any guaranteed minimum bandwith for the front desk. It would be lovely to set aside a minimum of 300kb for them, no matter what WAN was active for them at the moment.
AND - I suspect that customers can get problems with some protocols… Time will tell, and I hope someone will get back with some good news about this.
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Many looking at it, but no answer :-)
One question that might help: Will turning on "Sticky" help regarding problems with load balancing and some protocols? Or is there a problem at all with this?
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I've never had any luck with Sticky Connections. Browsing the web becomes impossible after a while with Sticky Connections enabled, and I'm not sure why. I have seen other people mention issues with Sticky Connections too.
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Hmm… I was kinda hoping it would help :-)
I don't know if it still is a problem, but I read somewhere here in the forum that when using load balancing, people trying to access https will get problems. Is this still true? If so, do you know if I can use a rule to keep them on the same connection for the duration of the session?
