I’m interested in using one of your load balancers but I’m not quite sure if it will do what I need it to. I have a unique situation in that this is for a shipboard network. We have 6 different WAN connections that continuously go in or out depending on our location and vary in cost and speed GREATLY. I need to know if the load balancing option can be disabled in favor of failover only. For example, if I have a slow connection that I prefer to use even though there is a faster one available that costs more per kB. Essentially I’d like to use the Peplink device as a least-cost router between all of our satellite/4G/and land-based internet connections. Thanks!
I like your username 
This is easily accomplished. For each WAN connection you can select either Always On or Backup Priority. For Backup Priority you can assign it a value, highest to lowest.
-Tim
Thanks Tim, my first name was too short!
I have a follow on question. The data sheet for the Peplink Balance says that the failover works by “continuously checking the health of all connected links.” I assume that this involves sending/receiving data over the link to measure the speed. Do you have any information on just how much data that might be? At $10 a MB a little bit can add up!
We use the Balance and Max routers for VSAT, WiFi, 3G/4G/LTE, Iridium and FBB. The health check pings are pretty small and only used when the WAN is in use. The bigger user is probably the Incontrol2 cloud side, but even that is only an occasional 10-20k. I have a 580 with one VSAT as primary and the other in backup 2 in “cold standby” so it isn’t using anything. A feature I would like to see is the ability to easily disable groups so when on FBB at $18/Mb you could easily shutdown a group like “Staff”. Maybe allow -1 since now all you can do is cut it down to 1kb…
Balance and MAX have WAN Health Check and InControl 2 as system usage.
For the bandwidth consumption,
WAN Health Check consume
Ping: 6MB per day
DNS: 6.5MB per day
InControl 2:
Typical usage: 2MB per day
With GPS data: 4.5MB per day
With Bandwidth usage monitor: 50MB per day
With Bandwidth usage monitor and GPS: 85MB per day
Thanks and that is critical information. Data costs for Fleet Broadband (Inmarsat satellite) are in some cases $18/Mb (yes that’s correct!) or higher so just the Ping alone will cost $108/day. Throw in IC2 and that is another $36/day. Keep the bandwidth monitor running and that is $900/day so potentially you could burn >$1,000 day ($30,000/month) just to support these functions so be forewarned!
We generally use FBB for “last resort” fail-over and only enable it to do mission critical functions then disable. In this scenario we need to drop all non-essential clients since the data costs could rapidly escalate out of control plus really bog down the limited (<500k) bandwidth. This is precisely why I’d like to see an easy way to disable the guest and staff groups per this thread:
Forget regular Iridium data, at 2.4k the ping alone would consume all the bandwidth so it needs to be hard switched in…
Currently, if you want to disable the guest and staff, you have to separate your users by IP range, then you can set the Firewall rules to block them.
Understand that, but what’s needed when in crisis mode is one simple action to perform this function. Hopefully “Currently” means you’ll consider this in the future.
Thanks!
Thanks! This is exactly what I needed.