Rural Africa : MultiWan Load Balancing with VLAN ( RB750UP)

RouterOS General
1

Hello Dear Experts :smiley:

I live in rural Africa in a part of the country where ADSL connections are capped at 1 M/s.
I am in the process of scoping out a multi-wan solution with vlan in order to reach a needed 4 M/s connection and acquiring the required gear to accomplish that.

Here is a rough diagram showing the plan to load balance 4 x 1M/s accessed wirelessly.

Here is a description of a similar setup recommended by Pfsense team, using a managed switch:

https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Multi-WAN_using_VLANs_with_pfSense

Since we need to power the Ubiquiti CPE Clients using POE (outdoors), I would like to use Mikrotik RB750UP Router as an affordable VLAN capable switch.

Creating VLAN2… VLAN5 to tag traffic coming from WAN 1-4 though the Ubiquiti AP routers onto POE capable ports 2-5 on RB750UP.

Then sending that traffic through port 1 RB750UP into Pfsense.

Then setting up load balancing between VLAN 2-5 in Pfsense using its MultiWan feature set.


We already know how to use pfsense for load balancing.

However, reading through the Mikrotik documentation I could not determine the following:

Can Mikrotik RB750UP do the job?

Can it tag traffic coming from each wireless client router using VLAN , than send it through to Pfsense and back?

I found the following document, but could not decipher it with certainty :open_mouth:

http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Switch_Chip_Features

Thanks in advance for your kind feedback!!

2

This will do what you need. Untagged traffic from each ethernet port leaves over a trunk as tagged traffic on ether5.

using ether5 as trunk port

create vlans on ether5

/interface vlan
add name=ether5.vlan1 interface=ether5 vlan-id=1
add name=ether5.vlan2 interface=ether5 vlan-id=2
add name=ether5.vlan3 interface=ether5 vlan-id=3
add name=ether5.vlan4 interface=ether5 vlan-id=4

set up bridges

/interface bridge
add name=br_vlan1
add name=br_vlan2
add name=br_vlan3
add name=br_vlan4

bridge untagged traffic into the trunk

/interface bridge port
add interface=ether1 bridge=br_vlan1
add interface=ether5.vlan1 bridge=br_vlan1
add interface=ether2 bridge=br_vlan2
add interface=ether5.vlan2 bridge=br_vlan2
add interface=ether3 bridge=br_vlan3
add interface=ether5.vlan3 bridge=br_vlan3
add interface=ether4 bridge=br_vlan4
add interface=ether5.vlan4 bridge=br_vlan4

3

Many thanks for taking the time to review and answer.

I guess I was baffled due to that document saying the switch chip on RB750UP does NOT support Rule tables.

I gather from your previous message that this does not matter for our scenario.

Thanks again for your kind assistance.

4

We are not using switch chip here, just bridges with vlans.

You can accomplish what you want with either switch chip or bridges, my code uses bridges.

Make sure you are running v6 on the 750, so fastpath works.