Loadbalancing Lan for 2 pfsense servers.

[Petervdberge]

Hello!

My name is peter, and this is my first post on this forum.
The last couple of days i've been playing around with two PFsense firewalls. They run on two old Dell PowerEdge 1950's.

Both servers are equipped with a 4x1Gbps PCi card, along with the 2 onboard 1Gbps nic's.

I've set the 4 interfaces up with LACP trunks, into a LAGG interface, wich seems to work. But, since i have a second server, with also 4 ports for lan, i want to loadbalance both the servers on the LAN side. I set up CARB interfaces, and have the second one now as a failover. wich seems to work fine. when i shut down pfsense 1, pfsense 2 wil take over in under a minute. great!

But loadbalancing wise, i've not been able to configure it. there's tons of tutorials to loadbalance WAN's, but not LAN's. Is this even an option? is there a package i should use?
The goal is to have a 8Gbit backbone for the LAN in an organisation.

I thank you for your time in advance! :D

Greets,
Peter

[cthomas]

To the best of my knowledge, this is not a supported configuration.

With that said….  you could try a crossed virtual ip configuration; however, without extensive testing, I'm not sure I would attempt to toss this into a production environment...

On your LAN...

FW1 = 192.168.0.3/24
FW2 = 192.168.0.4/24

CARPVIP1 = 192.168.0.1/24 (Active on FW1 - Skew FW1=0 / Skew FW2=100)
CARPVIP2 = 192.168.0.2/24 (Active on FW2 - Skew FW1=100 / Skew FW2=0)

Have DHCP on FW1 hand out .1 as Gateway, have FW2 hand out .2 as Gateway

If either FW goes down, the VIP fails over to the other FW and responds for both gateway IP's..  You'll probably need to disable XMLRPC sync for the CARP VIPs and manually configure them.

...c