RE: [FW1] Load Balancing to the internet using 2 ISPs - routing protocol?

["Mark Decker" <mdecker@FW1-NOSPAMrainfinity.com>]

Mike makes an important point about router memory.  To do load sharing
with BGP, you'll want to load the full Internet routing tables, which
are currently over 70Mb and growing daily.  Get at least 128Mb so it
will still work 6 months from now.  Also, keep in mind that BGP is much
better at failover than it is at load sharing.  It chooses a path based
on which ISP link has the best route.  If one of your providers is a
major NSP (e.g. Sprint, UUnet), and the other is a 2nd or 3rd tier
regional ISP, your load sharing will be very lopsided unless you do a
lot of manual tweaking.  You'll also need at least a contiguous Class C
block of addresses and an AS number from InterNIC to get your ISPs to
peer with you. Investigate their BGP peering policies, as some are more
cooperative than others. BGP is not for the faint-of-heart, but there
are a number of good docs on the subject, esp the FAQ by Avi Freedman.
Here is one place to start:
http://joe.lindsay.net/bgp.html

Mark L. Decker
Rainfinity - High Availability Software for E-Businessmdecker@rainfinity.com

----------------------------------
Mike Glassman wrote:
Take a look at BGP-4. We use that here and it works fine, just make sure
your Routers have enough
memory for load balancing.



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