Router for Load Balancing 2 Google Fiber Connections

[coxhaus]

This came up and I wonder if it is possible and is anybody doing it. Install 2 Google fiber connections with load balancing. What routers can handle this at full speed?

The next time I am downtown Austin Texas I will stop by the Google Office and ask if 2 fiber connections can be installed in one location.

 

[Cloud200]

This came up and I wonder if it is possible and is anybody doing it. Install 2 Google fiber connections with load balancing. What routers can handle this at full speed?

The next time I am downtown Austin Texas I will stop by the Google Office and ask if 2 fiber connections can be installed in one location.

Lol, depends on the budget, feature set and additional services running at the same time.
I have a Cisco ASR-1001 in the office waiting to be installed that will absolutely do it. It also costs about $6000.
Are you asking more along the lines of;
"What are the absolute cheapest routers that are not used PCs that can load balance 2gb/s and does LACP/Teaming or has a 10gbe interface to actually deliver on it . . ."

 

[coxhaus]

Lol, depends on the budget, feature set and additional services running at the same time.
I have a Cisco ASR-1001 in the office waiting to be installed that will absolutely do it. It also costs about $6000.
Are you asking more along the lines of;
"What are the absolute cheapest routers that are not used PCs that can load balance 2gb/s and does LACP/Teaming or has a 10gbe interface to actually deliver on it . . ."

I am just thinking along the lines of this forum. Something which the average someone would run at home. I guess we are talking 2 gig of through put. I am not sure there are consumer home routers which can handle this. This maybe something we have to grow into. I was asked and I don’t have an answer except Cisco makes one, high $$$.
Yes pfsense can do it with a big CPU I would think.

 

[Cloud200]

Well in that respect, lets say sub $1000 routers then.
Prefer Passive vs Active cooling.
If you cant get Passive, then at least be quiet.

Zyxel makes a perfectly applicable unit; ZyWall 310 for about $700.
Fortinet Fortigate 70D; Costs about $600 and has the throughput .
Mikrotik CCR series 1009 with Passive cooling seems to match "Home use" very well at about $500 and cheaper for the active cooling versions.
Ubiquiti ER8-Pro. As long as the ONLY thing you use it for is a load balancer it will do it. Dare you do anything that disables hardware acceleration it will drop down to about 300mb/s of throughput. Its also about as noisy as a enterprise level switch.

Ofc the 800lb gorilla in the room is getting a budget Desktop/Fake Server like a Lenovo TS140. Add in an SSD, 2x Intel PCI-E server grade NICs and mix in your favorite flavor of *nix Firewall/Router distro. Total cost should be somewhere around $600 and will have enough throughput to easily do 2gbps.

 

[coxhaus]

Yes they need to be quiet for home use.

 

[JoeJoe]

A quiet PC running pfsense.

But before you do that, why?

 

[peaks]

If you do it, why not get the second link from a different provider? Load balance across them when they are both up, and gain ISP redundancy which will seriously reduce outage risk when one goes down. It would be the real benefit of bothering with two links, IMO.

 

[chadster766]

If you want a lower cost Dual WAN option for this application I recommend the LRT224:

Linksys LRT224 Dual WAN Gigabit VPN Router Reviewed

 

[System Error Message]

the mikrotik CCR1036 has a model with 2 SFP+ and 8 Gigabit ethernet ports for $1000 and can handle NAT at port capacity however it can be noisy. It can do LACP on the interface but not with PPP connections but it can do PPP over the bonded interfaces. There is a passively cooled CCR1009 http://routerboard.com/CCR1009-8G-1S-1SplusPC which has a 10Gb/s interface that can max out more than 2 gigabit fibre optic connections.

I dont exactly know what google uses but as long as it doesnt use PPP you can easily load balance using LACP however with PPP you will need to use the firewall to perform load balancing which is practically no different to what other routers do except that with mikrotik you have to manually configure it.

Many consumer routers have dual WAN now but still havent even reached 2Gb/s yet and dont do that well in terms of stability. with 2 google fibre gigabit connections you can use 4 Gb/s at a time so there is no consumer router that can handle it if you plan to upload and download at the same time. I recommend the CCR because most of the ports arent switched and it is one of the cheapest out there that can handle your speeds. It doesnt have wireless though but because it is a software based router it is only limited by CPU and memory which is more than plentiful to run load balancing and firewalls to max out 2 gigabit connections using NAT without the limitations imposed by hardware accelerated NAT.

 

[coxhaus]

Why do you think with google fiber you can hit 4 gig per second? Each fiber connection has a receive and transmit which are both 1 gig each. I guess system error message has brought up a good point about when fiber transfers to copper. When I was talking bandwidth I was talking 2 gig full duplex so the processing power of the router needs to be 4 gig. So does this change things? Are all consumer routers now too small?

 

[Cloud200]

Why do you think with google fiber you can hit 4 gig per second? Each fiber connection has a receive and transmit which are both 1 gig each. I guess system error message has brought up a good point about when fiber transfers to copper. When I was talking bandwidth I was talking 2 gig full duplex so the processing power of the router needs to be 4 gig. So does this change things? Are all consumer routers now too small?

Anything over 1gb/s is not just a little out of regular consumer and SOHO space . . . it is touching on medium business levels of throughput. What I want to know is what the asian ISPs like Sony So-Net's 2/1gbs plan offers customers as a router.

 

[System Error Message]

Why do you think with google fiber you can hit 4 gig per second? Each fiber connection has a receive and transmit which are both 1 gig each. I guess system error message has brought up a good point about when fiber transfers to copper. When I was talking bandwidth I was talking 2 gig full duplex so the processing power of the router needs to be 4 gig. So does this change things? Are all consumer routers now too small?

To max out a full duplex connection (symmetrical upload/download for fibre optics) you would need 2x the bandwidth of each lane. This isnt the same with the routing capacity of a switch or router where it only needs to push half the total capacity of the ports for in and out filling up the ports. In the case of 2x gigabit connections for a 4 port gigabit router would be full port capacity. If you look at the router performance charts on this website you can find the bidirectional tests which shows that consumer/SOHO routers are inadequate to handle the full bandwidth of 2x gigabit connections or even full duplex gigabit connections not to mention that load balancing also adds additional CPU. In the case of my recommendation using like 10% of CPU for 4Gb/s NAT for the CCR1009 basically leaves a lot of headroom for other things you'd like to do. Unlike other routers you can use queues with load balancing and NAT and routerOS has a lot more options with QoS compared to other routers. CCRs can perform L2 switching with no performance penalty if you check the charts.

Basically theres 2 different speeds. Port capacity and routing capacity. If the device is fast enough than routing/switching capacity would keep up/exceed port capacity when it can push half the total port capacity. The given ISP speeds are your internet port capacity.

Consumer and SOHO routers can perform gigabit NAT speeds but only via hardware acceleration which adds limitations to what you can configure or do. This also does apply to ubiquiti edgerouters as they use hardware acceleration to do NAT hence why their VPN speeds match the MIPS based routers of other make. Routerboards are software routers but the CCR uses tilera CPUs that are specialised general purpose CPU that are faster at logic than math which is the opposite of CPUs like ARM. When comparing the software routing performance each Tilera core is much faster than an ARM A9 at routing/NAT or even broadcom's hardware NAT. The Tilera CPUs are meant to run linux firewalls or routers at really high speeds.

Technically you could buy development servers from Tilera and get a lot more than you would with mikrotik (PCIe port, more ports and stuff) but they are also much much more expansive too though you could get a 288 core Tilera router which has 8x36 core CPUs gigabit and 10G interfaces if you need multi gigabit heavy firewall speeds for FPS games. You'd also have to compile and install the linux OS to run on it too.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I am just thinking along the lines of this forum. Something which the average someone would run at home. I guess we are talking 2 gig of through put. I am not sure there are consumer home routers which can handle this. This maybe something we have to grow into. I was asked and I don’t have an answer except Cisco makes one, high $$$.
Yes pfsense can do it with a big CPU I would think.

Look into the different applications of multi-WAN.
The common two are:
*Failover
*Load Balancing

Failover is obvious, for redundancy, when one link goes down, the other kicks in as a backup. Typically you select two DIFFERENT ISPs for this.
Load Balancing...spreads the load, really only works well for large network with many nodes behind it. If you have just one or two computers on the LAN...you won't really be able to utilize this well. With a pair of 1 gig pipes....each connection (session) still can only peg at the max of one connection...1 gig. You won't get a PC to sit there and download at 2 gigs or behave like it's on a 2 gig pipe.

I think the goal you're looking for is "bonding"...which is something you have to do both on your end, and on the ISPs end.

 

[System Error Message]

Bonding only works for some setups but not all however you can achieve similar results using load balancing. For example in routerOS i can define 2 NAT rules with speed limits that go through 2 different links. When you have 2 ISPs this is what you will likely be using. You dont need a large network to use this, rather you just need 2 connections i.e. if your browser makes 2 connections to a webserver than both links can be used.

Bonding only works if there is 1 address involved. A passive example in routerOS is if i have 2 PPP links with the same account which will both get the same IP address. By having 2 same routes of equal value downloading a big file will use both links. (passive meaning no bonding configuration is required except for routes). You're more likely going to run into this if you have 1 account with an ISP that has greater bandwidth than the physical link so you can than bond multiple links together to achieve a single larger link.

The options you have depend on your setup since it is not always possible to use bonding. Some vendors may say they can bond different ISPs or VPNs but what they're doing is just using load balancing that seems very much like bonding which still cannot route a single connection over 2 different links.

 

[stevech]

Cradlepoint routers can load balance 2 WANs as I recall.

 

[coxhaus]

Cradlepoint routers can load balance 2 WANs as I recall.

It's not so much which router can load balance but how much processing power does the router have. There does not seem to be a router which can the load for low dollars. It is something we may have to wait for the next generation routers to have larger CPUs. pfsense with a big CPU may be the only solution for now.
I think a layer 2 device would be able to handle the load but trying to firewall at layer 2 for me would be hard. I think of firewalls as layer 3. I don 't know how you would block IP addresses at layer 2, there could be lots of macs for a single IP address.