I’ve been reading
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Load_Balancing_Persistent
and
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Improved_Load_Balancing_over_Multiple_Gateways
But it seems to me that each new packet is bumped to either odd or even.
I fail to see how the improved version would keep https traffic as some pages (like paypal, banking,etc) doesn’t seem to keep a session open but still drop login if another ip is used on next request (might be wrong), e.g client log in nicely, work, add payments and click to confirm only to get message that page is unavailable or logged out.
So here is my idea of a perfect load balancing scenario:
a)Need to load balance 4 or 5 gateways
b)Need to still distribute e.g. large multi-part downloads from one client over all 4 gateways
c)Need to keep IP-pairs over 1 gateway if using e.g port 443 or 8443
d)Need to keep track of bandwidth used as 1 connection may be using 1Mbps on interface A but 3 connections on interface B use 1Kbps, so route to less bandwidth used gateway B even with more connections.
Possible implementation
1)Have a time-out limit for ip pairs (client to website) that use certain protocols e.g https and route those src/dst address pairs over same gateway until timeout, handle other protocols (http) normally as in 2)
2)Instead of round-robin, balance every new connection to less bandwidth used gateway/interface
At the moment I’m using Linksys RV016 router to balance 4 WANs but https is a problem. Even with protocol binding of https to 1 WAN port, some https websites still seem to log users out and I need to create static routes, a growing and painfull routing table! Good thing about the RV016 is it seems to be doing point 2) above and it can balance e.g a 4M and a 1M line nicely, i.e (80% & 20%). The rest of my network (14XRb532, 3XRB333, 90XRB133C) is all MT, so if I can replace the Linksys with a perfect MT load balancer, I’ll do it tomorrow.
If I can do the ip-pair thingy as above, I’m sure it would cure all the problems associated with load balancing, and then multiple clients can use the same website over different gateways, not static routing as in my RV016.
Am I missing something and going overboard or is this https thing fixed for sure?
Also in all load balancing examples only 2 gateways are mentioned.
Is it possible to modify improved version to mark packets based on ip pairs?
Am I hopelessly lost or is there any hope for a non-guru MT fan?
Is the Pope Catholic?
MAIN QUESTIONS:
Balance 4 gateways? (Not same subnet, different interfaces)
Https sorted for sure and still balance normal downloads over all gateways?
Thanks in advance
Ekkas
PS:Unfortunately not possible to test in real-life as I have 100+ clients going at it 24/7, must get it right before I can switch over.