RV042 questions

slightly99 · ‎05-06-2009

Hi

I have a client in a single location with around 30 employees. They currently have Covad full T1 and VOIP running through a couple of Cisco managed switches. Right now I have them using a Netgear FVS114, which is pretty stable. I connect through an IPSec tunnel for admin purposes.

Their T1 seems to have occasional outages, and at 1.5Mb is often saturated. I'd like to get them on a dual-WAN system with a DSL supplier (probably AT&T), and wanted to know if the RV042 would be a good fit for their situation. I have a couple of questions for anyone who has experience with this setup.

1) Will it work happily with the VOIP service I have on one of the connections? Can I do any kind of QOS/bandwidth management with this unit, or should I in fact leave the VOIP QOS to Cisco's management?

2) I understand I can set the unit up in load-balance or failover mode. I'd love to have it working most of the time as a load-balancer between the two connections, to get higher throughput for the office. If it's in load-balance mode, and one of the connections fails (eg, the T1), will it switch over to the second connection automatically?

3) My preferred method of VPN through the FVS114 is an IPSec configuration with IPSecuritas on Mac. It's likely that we'll increase the use of VPN at the office, with potentially up to 5 people creating a connection to the office from their home location. What's the throughput for the RV042 for each IPSec connection?

3) Are there any catches I should watch out for when setting up a dual WAN? I understand that some websites which track IP addresses may not work correctly, since a particular user may connect to a site from both WAN ports in succession. Can anyone add detail to this issue, and what kinds of sites may not work with this configuration? Is there any way to maintain sessions through one port or the other?

I think that's all for now - very grateful for any help provided.

Matt

Te-Kai Liu · ‎05-10-2009

>1) Can I do any kind of QOS/bandwidth management with this unit

SR: I recall there is an appendix in the user guide that provides instructions on using the Bandwidth Management feature for VoIP services.

>2) I understand I can set the unit up in load-balance or failover mode. I'd love to have it working most of the time as a load-balancer between the two connections, to get higher throughput for the office. If it's in load-balance mode, and one of the connections fails (eg, the T1), will it switch over to the second connection automatically?

SR: In load balance mode, if a WAN goes down (as detected by the NSD mechanism), all traffic will be redirected to the other WAN automatically. There might be a couple of minutes before the redirection happens.

>3) My preferred method of VPN through the FVS114 is an IPSec configuration with IPSecuritas on Mac. It's likely that we'll increase the use of VPN at the office, with potentially up to 5 people creating a connection to the office from their home location. What's the throughput for the RV042 for each IPSec connection?

SR: RV042 can handle about 50Mbps of IPSec traffic at a maximum. This capacity will be shared by all IPsec connections.

>3) Are there any catches I should watch out for when setting up a dual WAN? I understand that some websites which track IP addresses may not work correctly, since a particular user may connect to a site from both WAN ports in succession. Can anyone add detail to this issue, and what kinds of sites may not work with this configuration? Is there any way to maintain sessions through one port or the other?

SR: RV042 will direct all packets within a TCP connection to the same WAN port. If a site requires 2 TCP connections coming from the same ip address during the login process, users may experience login failure. An easy workaround is to bind the https service to a dedicated WAN port. In case the dedicated WAN port goes down, the router will still redirect the https traffic to the other WAN port.