Load Balancing between 2 Cisco 2600

[kaustavgupta]

Hi all,

I need to load balance between 2 Cisco 2600 having 2 nos leased lines of bandwidth 768Kbps and 256Kbps.What shall be the best way to load balance ? Shall I have to go in for per destination process for 768 Kbps and per packet load balancing for 256 Kbps Plus custom queueing.

Anyhelp will be highly appreciated

Regds/-

kaustav

[ruwhite]

It depends on the routing protocol you are using. If you are using eigrp, you could set variance, and let it take care of getting the routes into the routing table, and the let CEF take care of the load sharing. Otherwise, you will need to get the two unequal cost routes into the table, or use policy based routing to manually pick out which traffic you want on each link.

MPLS Traffic Engineering can also do this.

Russ

[svermill]

I think with eigrp you can just use the 'traffic-share balanced' router config command to do load balancing accross unequal cost links.

[karl.jones]

How does this work scott?

[svermill]

Russ,

Is CEF recommended for a couple of low-end routers? I know that it is now supported in most standard IP feature packs. Is it now prefered over fast switching in all cases?

Thanks.

Karl,

The traffic-share feature of EIGRP allows for true load balancing accross unequal cost links. Say, for example, you had a link with a cost of 100 and link with a cost of 200. EIGRP traffic-share would send two packets via the 100 link for every one sent accross the 200 link. The math is something like:

highest metric / metric = share count (rounded down)

so

200 / 100 = 2

200 / 200 = 1

[ruwhite]

You'll have to set up variance in eigrp to get the routing protocol to put the two entries in the routing table. Beyond this, the routing table and cef will take care of proportioning the traffic.

Russ