Bst approach to couple 2 internet providers to dataecenter?

RouterOS General
1

Hello

given are:

  • An office with a Mikrotik 450G. Due to contraints of available providers (ouch) there are 2 uplinks there with 6mbit down, 512kbit up. I can go up to 4 providers via cable modem. IP addresses there are semi static. They dont chnge often, but they can - so we need to dial out from the office to the central location.
  • A central data center location with a Mikrotik 1100 AH soon to be installed.

The goal:

Establish a VPN between the locations that efficiently uses all uplinks for traffic to the central location. We CAN router ALL traffic through the data center (even web traffic etc.).

Currently no VLANs are used, although in the future this may be desireable. We so far run two different windows domains in the locations, but we can see one ethernet segment spanning both sites for a third virtual admin domain.

What is the best approach for this? Given MLPPTP is not supported (or is there a metarouter image I could just upload like from tomato)?

What I can see is:

  • Using multiple PPTP single links (one per uplink). Without using default route propagation this would allow me to set ECMP routing on both ends to equally distribute uplink traffic. Advantage: if one pptp link goes down it drops out of routing (which sometimes happens for a short time when concentrators of our ISP are reset). The main disadvantages I see for this is: (a) no routing protocol support (means I have to set up an ECMP route for every subnet we allocate somewhere) and (b) i wont get VLANs there. I would have to establish EOIP tunnels for that, or? ;(

  • Alternatively I could use L2TP or something instead of PPTP :wink: Makes no difference.

  • For better routing I could use no further routing tunnels (i.e. they only see their endpoints), then establish a IPIP tunnel over them. This would mean some overhead (pptp / l2tp tunnels, then an IPoverIP tunnel), but if I set this up right, the IpoverIp tunnel would carry routing protocols :wink: Takes out one configuration issue.

Any other / better alternative? I would also try to set up VPLS, but I dont find an answer whether VPLS can distribute traffic over multiple links.

Again, the goal is to be able to use both bandwidths for the same transfers (i.e. uploaing a file from the office to the central location), so the usual PCC approach is not usable.