Connecting Multiple LANs to Balance 580 with Different Outbound Priority Load-Balancing

Product Discussion Peplink Balance
1

Hi,

I am currently in progress to evaluate if Peplink 580 is the right product for us to pool and load-balance the different WAN links we have to make better use of our available bandwidth.
I read that there’s multiple LAN ports for this model, would it be possible to setup e.g.

  • LAN 1 for Corporate LAN and LAN 2 for Guest LAN
  • Internet traffic for LAN 1 get load-balanced to all the WAN uplinks while LAN 2 only get to use specific WAN link

The reason for this is that at the moment Guest LAN has its own dedicated WAN links which most of the time there isn’t much traffic on it.
If we can pool the WAN links together, it could serve as extra bandwidth for corporate users, but we don’t want Guest LAN to negatively impact the utilization for our corporate users.

Hope to get some advice soon. Thanks!

2

Hi,

Perform VLANs settings for the B580 and this will achieve your requirements.

Please refer to the attached screenshot for the sample setup:

Diagram

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B580 VLANs settings

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After defined VLANs settings, you can now enable outbound policy to route the internet traffics base on your requirement.

Example:

  1. You can distribute Corporate Network internet traffics using WAN1 & WAN2 (Weighted Balance - Algorithm)
  2. You can enforce Guest Network internet traffics using WAN2 only (Enforce - Algorithm, if allow fail-over you can use priority- Algorithm)

Thank You

3

Thanks for your prompt advice. At the moment we are not using VLAN actually, is this a must when configure multiple LAN? On the Balanced 580, I am seeing physical LAN ports.

Both Corporate LAN and the Guest LAN has their own respective firewalls. And we have 3 WAN uplinks altogether.
We are planning to use drop-in deployment on WAN 1 with Corporate LAN as we have a number of existing services hosted within.
But generally we can make changes on our Guest LAN firewall in order to connect as LAN 2 on the Peplink.

Could you advise the correct configuration in this scenario? Many thanks.

P/S: What’s the difference between priority and overflow algorithm by the way? They looks very similar to me.

4

For the network design, we will recommend to deploy all WAN connection in NAT mode as this will allow B580 to have all the connected clients info for the Corporate network & Guest network. You can refer to the attached screenshots for the different type of the deployment.

All WAN in NAT mode:

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**WAN1 Drop-in Mode, Other WANs in NAT mode **

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PS: For Drop in mode (WAN1) that using public IP range, WAN extra public IP address is require for the Guest firewall.

Priority algorithm

  • Traffic will be routed through the healthy WAN connection that has the highest priority. Traffics load will not be monitor for the WANs.

  • Example Priority rule:
    WAN1
    WAN2
    WAN3

Traffics will only forwarded to WAN2 only if WAN1 is down.
Traffics will only forwarded to WAN3 only if WAN1 & WAN2 is down.

Overflow algorithm

  • Traffic will be routed through the healthy WAN connection that has the highest priority and is not in full load. When this connection gets saturated, new sessions will be routed to the next healthy WAN connection that is not in full load.

  • Example overflow rule:
    WAN1
    WAN2
    WAN3

Traffics will start to forwarded to WAN2 if WAN1 is over 90% utilize.
Traffics will only forwarded to WAN3 if WAN1 over 90% & WAN2 is over 90% utilize.

Thank You