HI, Martin from Peplink here. Since the Balance 50 only supports link load balancing across the available WAN links, the OpenVPN session can only use one WAN link at a time, so you can never have more than one WAN links bandwidth available for it. You get awesome failover functionality though.
We have our own VPN bonding technology called SpeedFusion which works between two of our SpeedFusion Enabled devices that can aggregate bandwidth from all available WANs. You can read about that here http://www.peplink.com/technology/speedfusion-bonding-technology/
Thanks, we like to think that SpeedFusion its pretty awesome too ;-)That is actually pretty awesome on the VPN bonding over WAN.
All of our hardware is geared up specifically to support our SpeedFusion Bonding technology, so normally the important metrics are the number of SF Tunnels supported and the over all router throughput (rather than cpu/ram).Just took a look at peplink products and couldnt find more hardware information like CPU and RAM. Their cache devices look interesting but i would only get one if i could attach multiple hardrives in RAID. A single hard drive is capable of more than 100MB/s of throughput. I would prefer ram caching which is why i have a lot of ram and use ramdisks.
I wonder what the prices peplinks are like and it would be interesting to compare BPL-2500 to mikrotik CCR1036.
Ive seen many mikrotik customers that do VPN bonding but they usually do it within their core networks using CCRs to get many Gb/s of tunnel/VPN bandwidth.
their products do seem interesting.
Thanks, we like to think that SpeedFusion its pretty awesome too ;-)
We recently released a virtual SpeedFusion Bonding appliance, which can run in public hosted environments (there is an AWS version for example), and the whole idea there is you can use one of our physical routers that is SpeedFusion enabled, plug up to 13 WAN links in of any kind (fixed lines, cellular - whatever), and have a bonded VPN link between it and the publicly hosted appliance where you break out to the internet.
The end result is a resilient VPN connection - that can use WAN links from any ISP (and can even be fully mobile if you're just using cellular connections), that aggregates the available bandwidth and provides packet level failover when a WAN link is lost.
The plan is for our partners offer the hosted virtual appliance part as a service (although you can buy a license for your own use too of course), for those of us who live in rural locations with only slow speed DSL, maybe a little cellular and perhaps some local wifi services so that we can bond all of those together for faster more reliable internet connectivity.
I've looked into the peplink products for increasing bandwidth for a site-to-site connection that's not fast enough. But the cost of the routers have me looking for alternate solutions. I can fly to the site every quarter for the cost of the routers.
Actually, anyone in this space is around the same price--Mikrotik, Mushroom, etc. It's $1000+ to start.You're quite right. mikrotik CCRs are much cheaper than them and can bond VPN and tunnels and are much faster.
That's what I thought. In my research, I found that it could do multi-wan very well, but not the peplink style vpn bonding, which is what I need.You can using load balancing but it is not simple and you would also need to set the routes for both links too. Ive done this before using multiple PPPOE links over a single cable to get better data rates from my ISP. However PPPOE is a L2 protocol. You can configure interfaces to have the same IP addresses and gateways but you than must configure the routes so that it can work properly. You can do this with different IPs but it is more complicated. Packets went through the best available link and did use both links at the same time.
You can also load balance things as long as you can use the firewall for them if they use a specific port and or protocol. If RDP is L7 than you will have to add the hash to the firewall in order to use it. One thing you can do is to have 2 firewall rules in routerOS, the first one with a rate limit that sends everything through the first link and a 2nd general rule that sends everything else to the 2nd link.
One of the tools that routerOS provides is a PPP scanner which is very useful to detect PPP servers so you can choose multiple good ones at the same time.
RouterOS is the same across all models.
HI, Martin from Peplink here. Since the Balance 50 only supports link load balancing across the available WAN links, the OpenVPN session can only use one WAN link at a time, so you can never have more than one WAN links bandwidth available for it. You get awesome failover functionality though.
We have our own VPN bonding technology called SpeedFusion which works between two of our SpeedFusion Enabled devices that can aggregate bandwidth from all available WANs. You can read about that here http://www.peplink.com/technology/speedfusion-bonding-technology/
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