Hope I have posted this in the appropriate space.
I am a complete beginner to networking basics and have only had a crash course recently in order to accomplish some tasks at work (I am but a lowly intern, please be gentle). I am attempting to setup RouterOS to accomplish some basic failover between two servers.
Network traffic will be redirected to a default server, and in the case of a failure on the main server traffic will then be redirected to the backup (failover).
I have considered BGP, OSPF, and RIP - but I am not sure if there is a much simpler means of accomplishing my task. I thought I found a simple command to complete in RouterOS found here: http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Two_gateways_failover. I am just not totally sure of how to proceed.
Any advice or directions would be immensely appreciated.
(Note: I am using a VirtualBox environment to test the functionality of RouterOS and am using basic Debian VMs as my servers and a client that will try and ping the servers to test the failover function)
But this is a poor solution and shouldn’t be done on the router at all (or at least should be done on a router intended to function as a load balancer, which RouterOS is no). Use VRRP or whatever Microsoft calls the fencing/HA technology built into Windows depeding on the OS you want to service when in production, or use a dedicated HA appliance. A router pinging stuff does not make for good failover. You want something that keeps state across application layer services on the server.
The servers in this scenario have the same IP address. Sorry for the confusion, I attached a new picture. I am told that they cannot be changed due to business practice. Are you saying that using RouterOS is inappropriate for this problem? I was simply tasked with using this software to try and create the failover protocol - so I started working on it.
If they share the same IP address via some sort of failover protocol I don’t see how the router is involved at all. The router simply delivers a packet to a same subnet host whose IP address it resolves to a MAC address via ARP. It is up to the severs to implement whatever HA technology they use to have them take over each other’s virtual IP address. The router doesn’t know or care that there is a failover machine that can take over.
If you need to from scratch create some layer 2 failover between devices that are not the routers themselves then yes, RouterOS is not a suitable software to solve the task.
The solution will most definitely not involve any routing protocols such as BGP, RIP, or OSPF. The router and servers are directly connected on a broadcast network, so routing has nothing to do with the task at hand.
Ideally either a dedicated load sharing appliance made for this purpose, or a fencing technology built into the OS (BSD/Linux/Win2k8+ all support this kind of thing natively).
I was intrigued by the term “fencing technology built into the os” , if it does not require another fencing device such as https://access.redhat.com/articles/28603
