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pospanko
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Multiple gateways or only one?

Wed Dec 05, 2012 3:15 pm

Hi all!

I have network which have gateway on my central location.
My network is spread about 40 km wide so I think to put some other gateways at both ends of my network.
Is this wise? Or to stay on only one location?
I currently use OSPF on my network and static routing on my gateway. If I put other gateways in my network I must go to BGP if I'm not mistaken?
How this complicate things? What about load balancing?
Any suggestion would be appreciated.
Thx
 
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tomaskir
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Re: Multiple gateways or only one?

Wed Dec 05, 2012 6:08 pm

This is a very complicated issue obviously. It depends on your topology and on what you want to do.

It also depends on whether you use a public or private IP space. If you want redundancy in case one connection goes down and you use public IP space, you need BGP.
Load balancing would or would not be simple since your gateways are on the opposite sides of your network, and there are many ways how to do load balancing. That again depends on the topology.

Everything depends on the topology of your network and on what you are trying to achieve. With the little information you have provided, its hard to help.
 
InoX
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Re: Multiple gateways or only one?

Wed Dec 05, 2012 6:14 pm

I use one gateway at every vilage/town. No need of bgp or load balancing and I use public an privat ip's.
 
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tomaskir
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Re: Multiple gateways or only one?

Wed Dec 05, 2012 9:00 pm

You can obviously do it like that... But you lose a lot of advantages.

If one of your gateways dies, the public IPs for that connection will be inaccessible without BGP.
You have no load-balancing. You have to do policy routing, which is not a best practice, and some connections might be over-utilized, while others are under-utilized.
Any kind of proxying or acceleration it hard to implement.
etc.

Again, it depends on the topology, what kind of inter-connect do you have between the towns, etc...
 
pospanko
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Re: Multiple gateways or only one?

Fri Dec 07, 2012 5:15 pm

Hi,

I'll try to give more information about my network.
I plan to do this because of future expansion and high availability.

On picture, which simplifies my core backbone but for this lets take it as it shown, you can see 'my plan':

Image


Current situation:
Behind every core router I have lots of other boards and few OSPF areas.
I use private address space on my network and I EoIP every CPE to my central location where I bridge them and use hotspot for authentication. Every user gets public IP address.

Plan:
My plan is to add two more gateways. On core routers 2 ad 3.
Because of that I must setup hotspot on every AP (remove central hotspot setup) so that users can go out any of available gateways.
I want to use all advantages from that setup as tomaskir mentioned.
I want that my users go trough another gateway if one fail (the main reason).
I want them also to go to Internet trough closest one if active because of latency.
I want good load balancing over multiple gateways (I have good connectivity over my core network).


Main questions are (i think :)):
Can I stay on private address space across my network? Just propagate private IP network information to my gateway routers. Good and bad side of this setup?
Is OSPF locally and BGP on gateway routers good way to go?
Or just stay on current setup and have only one gateway?

Thx all.
 
pospanko
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Re: Multiple gateways or only one?

Thu Dec 13, 2012 3:34 pm

Any suggestions?
 
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tomaskir
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Re: Multiple gateways or only one?

Thu Dec 13, 2012 3:40 pm

As I mentioned before, its a pretty complicated issue with multiple solutions and would need a lot of typing.

If you really wanna get into it, email me and I will send you my skype, I could make some time to go through it.

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