Load Balancing ETH ports, ip routes or bonding?

RouterOS General
1

Hello,

i did read into bonding and general load-balancing but i am not sure if i did understood correctly how it works on RouterOS. Currently i am trying to figure out what is the best way to bundle and load-balance 2 routerOS systems via 2 ethernet links.

Questions:

When i use (static) ip routes over 2 (or more) ethernet links between 2 mikrotik routers will the ip packets be evenly (round-robin) distributed/send over those 2 links? Like it would be with a cisco, juniper or vanilla-linux router? (Actually it doesnt look like this if i produce traffic and have a look at the traffic statistics on the ethernet interfaces)

When i use bonding in default mode (balance-rr) would ip packets arrive not on sequence and produce ip protocol overhead?

Is there an bonding mode which will ensure that ip packages are sent in sequence order over bonded ethernet-links?

Any other technique/config advised to implemet load-balancing and bundling for IP over ethernet?

thx,

Tycho

2

Well, it looks like i have to answer my question myself. After searching the forum a bit more i did find this thread here where poeple discuss different bonding/vlan setup and check the tcp performance.

According to this thread here bonding works without negative impact on tcp performance due to packets arriving out-of-sequence if one uses the “balance-alb” mode on the bonding interface.

Citation

problem resolved by changing the “balance rr” (default) “to balance alb”.

I go an try this now :slight_smile: Will report back