¶ Overview
Link Balancer is a feature to help you manage multiple internet connections, or in-general multiple connections between any two points and apply policy-based routing.
¶ Link Balancer has 4 key functions:
-
It can check all your gateways, if they are alive.
You can even write your own checks for your gateways.
Link Balancer can continuously monitor them and react to failures. -
It can set multiple default gateways that will be used in a weighted round-robin fashion.
Link Balancer can configure your routing tables to achieve optimal balancing of all your upstream providers, or balance multiple VPN links. -
It can manage your routing tables.
Link Balancer will copy routing tables and apply all changes incrementally,
after comparing routing tables line by line. -
It can apply policy-based routing rules.
Link Balancer can configure policy based routing rules, allowing you to configure routes based both on source and destination IPs, on marks, tos, etc.
For example, the following can all be handled by Link Balancer:
- 2+ internet provider links are balanced concurrently.
- Balancing is implemented using weights, so that each provider is getting a percentage of the connections. The links do not need to be of the same speed.
- In cooperation with the Firewall Feature, even individual services may have special routing (for example SMTP goes through DSL A, HTTP through DSL B, anything else through DSL C).
¶ Install Link Balancer
- On “Your System” left menu, choose “Features”
- On the search field, type “Link balancer”
- Click on Install button
¶ Configure Load-Balanced Interfaces
¶ Select the Balanced Interfaces
- After installed the Link Balancer service, on the left menu, choose “Network” and “Link balancer” option.
- The first section “Interfaces” list all available Interfaces that have a designed gateway.
- Click on the checkbox of the Interface that are connected to your ISP.
You must have at least 2 network interfaces with 2 ISPs.
¶ Tune the Balancers
If you plan to use the proxy in transparent mode, you think that you need balance using the proxy “MARK” Web Application Firewall feature.
The balancing system use 2 methods:
- The weight that drive the priority of the Interface use.
- The percentage that drive the probability to mark packets in order to be forwarded to the right Interface.
When clicking on the interface from the table, a parameters layer is displayed.
