VPN and aggregation (bonding)

RouterOS General
1

Hello,
I want to know if my idea is possible. Is is possible to install mikrotik in a dedicated server (on a $39/month datacenter) and configure my RB450 to bond three ADSL lines (1M/512K) to get a 3M/1.5M link…could it work??
I was thinking is a VPN with bonding, will it be the best way to do that?
Thanks

Best regards

2

The old non-wiki manuals give examples of bonding EoIP tunnels over seperate connections to provide one large aggreate connection. I have tested this for my company and found the following:

Pros

  • Can be used to aggregate two or more separate connections together.

Cons

  • No automatic fail-over. In a three connection setup, if you lose a connection you will suffer 33% packet loss. We wrote some scripts to identify this and remove EoIP tunnels from the bonded interface as necessary, but it’s not great.
  • Maximum speed is that of the lowest speed connection. If your three lines are all exactly 1Mb, you will get 3Mb bonded. If however you have two 1Mb lines and one 0.5Mb line, you will get 1.5Mb bonded (3 times 0.5Mb).
  • Re-transmits due to differing latencies make it useless for gaming, VoIP or any other time-sensitive protocol.
  • You’ll lose around 20% of bandwidth to overheads of the tunnel encapsulation and re-transmits. Ie. Three 1Mb connections bonded will give you a 3Mb connection, with a maximum throughput of around 2.4Mb. If you have a 0.5Mb connection as above, you won’t get 2.5Mb, you’ll get 1.2Mb - barely better than a raw single connection.

In summary, you’ll get much better results if you just use the ECMP load balancing http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/ECMP_load_balancing_with_masquerade features.

3

Ouch! EoIP have a lot of problems then. And is there anotherbway to do an effective bonding solution? (with asymetric links)

I was seeing the sharedband.com (do you know it?) and I think that its only EoIP.

4

EoIP bonding does work if you want something really straight forwards with no frills, and you’re fairly certain of your network. It just doesn’t work so well over ADSL which can be quite variable.

At my workplace we did trial the sharedband.com system. It uses a proprietry firmware on Netgear or Linksys routers to provide bonding and failover on proprietry VPN tunnels which actually works very, very well. The datacentre end unfortunately requires 3 seperate servers, plus licensing of their software. Their system is nice in that it’s very low cost for the customer (couple of cheap Netgear routers and a £15 license fee per month, from memory), but the ISP has to setup 3 servers and buy the software - when we looked at it the setup costs for us were going to be something like £8000.

5

Wow. It’s really an expensive solution for the datacenter. My problem is that I live in Chile, and the sharedband service is only available in the us and the uk.
Do you know other solution for (low cost and that works fine) bonding over IP?

Best regards,

Salvador

6

Remember that when doing this, the subscribed bandwidth at the datacenter side have to be the sum of both directions of your DSLs plus a bit more. That is: you need at the datacenter a simmetric connection of 3+1.5Mbps for Download and 3+1.5Mbps for Upload, and a bit more to each to avoid saturation, packet losses and ping risings.



Example:
Bonded ADSL: 3Mbps Download, 1.5Mbps Upload. (1Mbps/500Kbps, each. Ideal situation: No overheads)
Datacenter: 10Mbps
No overheads nor ACKs included to simplify.

The datacenter side will use part of its download bandwidth ( 3Mbps) to fetch data from internet. Then, this data will be relayed using its Upload to your Bonded ADSLs at Full Bonded Download Speed: That is 3Mbps.

If you are also uploading data to Internet, you will send it through your Bonded Upload, 1.5Mbps to the datacenter; there it will be relayed to internet using the datacenter upload at 1.5Mbps, too.


If you sum the used bandwidths at datacenter you will have:

3Mbps coming in from internet
1.5Mbps coming in from DSLs
3Mbps going out to DSLs
1.5Mbps going out to internet.

From internet: 3+1.5Mbps = 4.5 Mbps → 5Mbps
To internet: 1.5+3Mbps = 4.5Mbps → 5Mbps.

You need at least, 5Mbps.

Remember it when subscribing your datacenter.

Also remember that many datacenter also cap the data transfer per Month.


I studied it a lot, by I needed to apply for 15Mbps + DSLs, and it was totally unaffordable for me.


Good luck with this setup.

7

Hi Daniel,
i understand it. Actually I was thinking of rent a 10mbps unmetered at iWeb.com. Now my question is how to implement it like the sharedband service (in a reliable way without packet loss and with full redundancy).
Best regards

8

Hi Danielillu,


where are you working? I’m from BCN too.

9

Hola,
parece que se habla harto español por acá.
Y saben como lo hará sharedband para lograr tal eficiencia?

Saludos

10

yesss, English, please =)

11

I think Chupaka read all the posts in the forum.. xD

Chupaka, if you come to Spain, call me! I’ll make you a tour in Barcelona : P!

12

actually, I read only the following:
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we’ve bought some RBs, so maybe soon I’ll start visiting RB and Wi-Fi forums :smiley:

13

thanks! maybe the next MUM will be in Spain? :smiley:

14

Hi chupaka
I was asking if anyone else test the sharedband service. And if anyone know how it works?
Will you go to the Mum Argentina?

Best regards

15

I’m working at TGNWifi, maybe a member of your company met my boss at Madrid Training late-2007 or early-2008.

16

somebody have already posted - it works =) and it works because it doesn’t use NAT - so it’s similar to bonding

p.s. unfortunately, Argentina is too far and too expensive for me :frowning: