Multi Wan and web server question

puwawa · May 29, 2015, 6:03 AM

Hello good people of pfsense forum.
Would be much appreciated if anyone could give me some pointers. Here it goes… :)

let's assume, Wan1 and Wan 2 both has 10up 10down speed. and web server is behind pfsense.

how do I load balance the 2 Wans so that I can achieve theoretical 20 upload speeds?

do I load balance the 2 Wans and group gateway them then the job is done? or Do I have to do some setting on the pfsense or web server? like pic 1 is upload by wan 1 and pic 2 is upload by wan 2.

I did some research on multi-Wan but not much of them mention anything about upload speeds or web server hostings.

Thank you for reading

tim.mcmanus · Jun 1, 2015, 10:23 PM

In short, you can't. The two WAN connection need to be bonded or joined together by the ISP and then presented to you.

You can, however, load balance between the two to share the bandwidth, but one single connection or download cannot take advantage of both connections' bandwidth without changes at the ISP.

Regarding your web server example; by using round-robin DNS, you can have different WAN connections come into each WAN port on an alternating basis. It's not perfect and won't accurately do load balancing, but it's not too tough to do.

puwawa · Jun 7, 2015, 11:15 AM

Tim.mcmanus
Thank you very much for ur reply. I am aware of DNS round robin methods. But just feels tha it's not elegant enough or wonders that if there are better way to do it.
Due to lack or knowledge and experiences, I am hoping someone has a solution to increase upload speed or share the bandwidth loads among servers. Hopefully without breaking the banks. ;D
1question regarding your reply. Am I correct to assume that pfsense multi-WANs –>gateway grouping only works with ISP consent/setting ?
Thank you again for helping a noob like me :)

Richard

@tim.mcmanus:

In short, you can't. The two WAN connection need to be bonded or joined together by the ISP and then presented to you.

You can, however, load balance between the two to share the bandwidth, but one single connection or download cannot take advantage of both connections' bandwidth without changes at the ISP.

Regarding your web server example; by using round-robin DNS, you can have different WAN connections come into each WAN port on an alternating basis. It's not perfect and won't accurately do load balancing, but it's not too tough to do.

tim.mcmanus · Jun 7, 2015, 2:10 PM

Multi-WAN and bonded circuits are often confused.

Multi-WAN means you have one or more WAN connections that pfSense can use. This is very common in a business setting where you have one Internet connection that for example can be the "main" WAN connection and another, less expensive link as a "secondary" or "failover" link. If you have a failover gateway group created, traffic can go from using the main connection to the failover if the main link goes down. Gateway groups can also be used load balance Internet connections by balancing traffic across the two links. This is different from bonding links together. Balancing traffic mean each connection would carry traffic exclusively versus a bonded pair that presents all of the bandwidth as a single connection.

https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Multi-WAN

https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Gateway_Settings