Hi All,

At work, we currently have three ADSL Lines with BT Infinity.

I'd like to implement a load balancing router to manage our internet access seamlessly.

I'm leaning towards the Draytek 3200n (purely because I've used the 2820n without any issues).

Ideally I'd do away with the BT Business Hubs, and have separate wifi access points.

Any other suggestions?

J

 

I've used pfsense running on a Virtual machine on my ESXi host to achieve this. Only expense would be additional NICS if you want to avoid double network address translation (if you squeeze it all on to one NIC, you can end up with some funky broadcast loops if you're not careful with Firewall Rules, it's not good practice IMO… although I’ve done it on my home network because I’m a pikey ).

You also need to spend a bit of time programing it to deal with https, which won’t like it one bit if it keeps seeing requests from different IP addresses. Plenty of guides out there.

I don’t suppose you know if your ISP supports MLPPP?

We actually resell a product that bonds multiple connections, even on different ISPs. That way you just present to the outside world like a single connection and can get the combined transfer speed of your lines rather than one line per session. It’ll even keep a connection if LAN links fall over (VoIP calls survive it).

 

What sort of budget?

Is the interface on the 3200 the same as the 2800 series? I've setup LB on a 2820/2830 and whilst it did the job, I thought it was somewhat basic (price of the 2830 allowing of course).

I do a lot with SonicWalls and I find policy based routes very useful. So for instance, you can direct particular traffic types or protocols to a specific WAN interface.

 

Budget was about £300

I've gone for the 3200n.

Yes the interface is similar to the 2800 series - but MUCH faster & with additional toys & much more refinement.

Hooked straight up to the BT main router via PPPoE

Set up VPN, Wireless, exchange forwarding in about 5 minutes flat.

Very easy to do.

performance wise, seems much faster than the BT hub we've replaced.

The additional ADSL lines will be connected next week.