Hi all,
Still wrapping my head around the whole SD-WAN thing so maybe I’m way off the mark on this. From what I understand, any time you do seamless fail over, like SIP and so on, or speed bonding, you need to have a VPN or tunnel back to the SD WAN providers data centre, with all traffic going out from there, otherwise it’s impossible to fail a SIP call over from an active Cable line to DSL for example.
If I am correct in this understanding, then I would assume traffic needs to be routed to Peplink and then out to the Internet. If that’s the case, then I have a couple questions. 1) Where are these data centres located, as we are in Canada, so having traffic traverse through the United States is not possible for our customers, so wondering how that works. 2) Do you not need to pay Peplink for the actual bandwidth as well? If I have 3 1000Mbps fibre connections at my site and use this SpeedFusion then Peplink would of course need that same amount of bandwidth at the DC to handle my traffic, which wouldn’t be free to them. So also wondering how that all works or if I’m completely off the mark here.
We’re a managed services provider so looking to potentially partner with Peplink as a partner, so just researching and learning right now. Thanks!
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Yes you are right to take advantage of any of the hot failover / bonding technologies which are VPN based you need to route traffic from your location using a physical appliance that has the internet connectivity attached to another Peplink appliance hosted somewhere with enough bandwidth to act as a hop off point or hub to the internet,
Peplink doesn’t offer this service but sells the building blocks for you to host it yourself.
The current trend is to buy a FusionHub virtual appliance license and host that in the cloud (Azure / AWS / Google / or nearly any other hosting provider for that matter). Although some customers still buy the bigger balance hardware appliances (like the B710 - B2500) and host those in co-location datacenters in active passive HA pairs (but this is a little old fashioned in my opinion and doesn’t take advantage of the benefits of modern cloud based services).
Either way you can host the cloud/datacenter based appliance locally to you (geographically speaking) and you would pay the hosting provider for bandwidth.
The biggest Balance router available (B2500) has a 2Gbps SpeedFusion Bandwidth limitation, but I would suspect that with 3 x 1Gbps links bandwidth bonding isn’t the driving force behind this requirement but rather service session reliabiliy - and so you’ll need to think about how much bandwidth those services will require so you can size the hub appliance properly.
Personally my preference is to host multiple smaller FusionHub appliances in multiple datacenters and split customers and traffic between them. You can then link the Fusionhubs together using PepVPN to allow mesh routing between them in the cloud to provide routing between remote sites that are connected to different FusionHubs.
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That’s very helpful, I’ll read through this in detail later. Was checking the Peplink site a ton but didn’t really see anything indicating if they had their own DC for this or if I do it myself so to speak. So that makes sense, thanks!