hello forum!!
wanted to know if you can, somehow, manage two providers from a central router but each provider is in different locations.
would manage the bandwidth from rb-core.
customers connected to rb-right can go by ISP1 or ISP2, I decide.
if customers RB-RIGHT exit through ISP2 should not recharge the link between RB-CORE and RB-RIGHT (I used EOIP and not my solution)
I can do this?
I think the answer to this is yes, but what are your expectations? It’s definitely possible if you weight the routes manually, but if you’re expecting automatic load balancing then perhaps not. How would rb-core know what the utilisation on ISP2 is if the customer’s traffic only traverses rb-right? There is probably some protocol or extension to OSPF that helps with distributed load balancing but I don’t know what it’s called or if Mikrotik implement it.
To make this work the way you want, you will need a layer2 link from core router to each ISP.
This means that the border routers will need to create either an EoIP tunnel or else you will need to use MPLS for VPLS. You might be able to do it without VPLS but I haven’t tried such a thing.
Basically, bridge the 2 ISPs directly to core and make the entire network route to R1 as the default gateway.
Personally, I would never use such a design. In fact, we worked hard to design basically the exact opposite behavior on our network. (Internet always goes to/from the nearest connection, and only uses the more distant one as a backup)
The centralized load balancing design creates double traffic on your internal links. Imagine a user on cutomer on RB-Right, whose download is coming in through ISP2. The traffic comes in ISP2, goes to RB core, and then back across the same link to RB-Right again, and finally to the customer. If you added an isp3 to RB-Left, then this would get even worse.
No matter what technology you use to force this type of topology, the ultimate fact will be that traffic from ISP2 → customers-Right will use the link twice.
Unless your internal links are so much faster and so much cheaper and so much easier to augment than internet connections, you should let the network behave more naturally. (If the internals are gigabit links and the externals are 10Mbps, then my stated design issues really don’t matter.)