Dual-WAN Load Balancing Solution.

vinaycm

Adept
I've got some 40 systems distributed over two switches which inturn are connected to a multi WAN router (D-Link 1705B). There are two ISP's, the primary one having 20Mbps & secondary one having 4Mbps. As of now the secondary one is used for backup when the primary line fails.

I've heard that combining the two lines into one fat line with combined bandwidth is having a lot of issues. I would like to know if there is any way to:

** Assign some particular internal hosts to the primary ISP and the others to the secondary ISP **

I've checked some multi WAN router models (Linksys RV042 & TL-R480T+), but none seems to have this particular functionality. I've also checked some linux/bsd based router OS's like IPCop, clearOS etc. But none seems to have this functionality. However a particular OS named Untangle have this as an add-on module, but is a paid one.

I'm looking forward to buying a new router (within a max budget of 25K) or build a linux/bsd based router machine.

Please suggest a router model or a linux/bsd based router OS that can meet my requirement.
 
I've got some 40 systems distributed over two switches which inturn are connected to a multi WAN router (D-Link 1705B). There are two ISP's, the primary one having 20Mbps & secondary one having 4Mbps. As of now the secondary one is used for backup when the primary line fails.

I've heard that combining the two lines into one fat line with combined bandwidth is having a lot of issues. I would like to know if there is any way to:

** Assign some particular internal hosts to the primary ISP and the others to the secondary ISP **

I've checked some multi WAN router models (Linksys RV042 & TL-R480T+), but none seems to have this particular functionality. I've also checked some linux/bsd based router OS's like IPCop, clearOS etc. But none seems to have this functionality. However a particular OS named Untangle have this as an add-on module, but is a paid one.

I'm looking forward to buying a new router (within a max budget of 25K) or build a linux/bsd based router machine.

Please suggest a router model or a linux/bsd based router OS that can meet my requirement.

If you can group the 40 systems into 2 subnets, you achieve this by implementing policy routing in linux. I have seen this implementation in a firewall appliance which used linux as the OS. Have you looked at the networking features of Openwrt ? If you need more details, I can probably look this up this weekend.
 
If you can group the 40 systems into 2 subnets, you achieve this by implementing policy routing in linux. I have seen this implementation in a firewall appliance which used linux as the OS. Have you looked at the networking features of Openwrt ? If you need more details, I can probably look this up this weekend.

Actually all the systems are on the same subnet. The router should be able to assign a particular ISP for individual systems or system groups.
 
You can write policy routing for each system, but that will be tedious and error prone. What i suggest is to keep the existing subnet mask as it is for the systems, while divide them to /29 or /28 subnets logically. To give you an example, let us assume the network is 192.168.1.0/24 and all systems are assigned ip address sequentially from 192.168.1.2 to 192.168.1.44. You can group 8 systems together by using a subnet mask by calling 192.168.1.8/29, 192.168.1.16/29 etc in the policy routes. Here you are not changing any network settings of the systems. However you will have to change the ip address of a few systems so that they are in the desired groups.

What is your budget for this ? This is actually a lot easier in dedicated firewall appliances.

It should be fun getting this done in openwrt or any linux distribution.
 
Thanks for the responses. I would like to know whether there is any straight forward way to get this done, like grouping a particular set of IP's & setting a particular ISP for that hosts. While all the internal hosts remain in one single subnet. I've seen this functionality as an add-on module in Untangle, but it was a paid one. Is there any other way to get this done?
 
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