Hoping someone can point me in the right direction here.
I wish to set up some form of load balancing & redundancy for some gaming servers I am running from home. I want to be able to set up a fail over network using 2 different ISPs and hopefully a mikrotik can help me do this.
I have done a lot of research but am still quite confused as to what will work. Im thinking that I need to use vrrp in order to acheive what i’m trying to do but need confirmation before making a purchase.
I have 2 Fibre to the premises connections with 2 different ISPs each has its own modem and then connects to each server. I know neither isp will change any configuration on there end to help me achieve this so i was hoping its possible with the mikrotik.
What I need is the mikrotik to have a single public ip so that I can connect it to my server and should isp1 drop out the mikrotik will route via isp2 without my end users dropping out.
Is this possible?
PS thanks in advance for taking the time to help me.
The IP address you are assigned still belongs to the ISP, you are just “leasing” it.
The MikroTik can certainly load balance / failover between 2 ISP connections easily, but it would not be transparent for the external clients connecting to you. The best option to overcome the IP address issue would be to setup a domain name instead and rely on DNS to direct traffic to the correct ISP. In an event of failure of an ISP you would have to change where the domain name points.
bkuhn is 100% correct. I might add that if you do implement a hostname which points to your public IP on isp1, then use a very low TTL like 30 seconds so that in the event of link failure, you can push a ddns update which will quickly take over.
Your only other option is to get a full /24 of public IP addresses, get an ASN number, and then advertise your /24 with BGP.
That’s getting into the big leagues, though, so don’t try this unless you have a good bit of networking experience.
For the cost of the second FTTH connection, you could probably just use a cloud-based server with Amazon or something similar… that would be a pretty stable connection.
