FAQ: BroadLink Multi-homing Load Balancers BroadLink Overview Outbound Traffic Inbound Traffic Bandwidth Management Persistent Routing High Availability BroadLink Overview 1. What is BroadLink? BroadLink is an integrated WAN management solution for your network. ISP1 INTERNET ISP2 ISP3 ISP4 2. What does BroadLink do? BroadLink can aggregate multiple lease lines and broadband lines, offer redundancy and balance the traffic whether inbound or outbound, optimizing the usage of bandwidth. 3. What are the benefits of BroadLink DNS? BroadLink can enhance network performance for SMB organizations; improve networking availability and scalability by providing a more efficient method of public and private traffic which lowers the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). 2005, SOHOware, Inc. SOHOware is a registered trademarks of SOHOware, Inc. 1
Outbound Traffic 1. What is Auto Routing? The Auto Routing function is responsible for outbound traffic load balancing and fault tolerance. 2. What can Auto Routing do? Auto Routing can route traffic on demand, supporting load balancing and fault tolerance based on L3 and L4 information. For example, you can have source IPs from several WAN links perform fault tolerance between the WAN links. 3. How many algorithms does BroadLink support? There are seven kinds of algorithm available, including: Fix, Round Robin, Weighted Round Robin, Dynamic by Upstream Traffic, Dynamic by Downstream, and Dynamic by Total Traffic and Dynamic by Connection. 4. How can I have load balancing and fault tolerance by Auto Routing? Auto Routing is accomplished by Policy and Filter. Policy controls the usage of each WAN link and Filter applies routing policies and fail-over routing policies based on L3 and L4 information. 2005, SOHOware, Inc. SOHOware is a registered trademarks of SOHOware, Inc. 2
Inbound Traffic 1. What is Multi-homing? Multi-homing is the function in BroadLink responsible for inbound traffic load balancing and fault tolerance. 2. How does Multi-homing accomplish load balancing and fault tolerance for inbound traffic? Multi-homing controls inbound traffic through name resolution. By resolving one name to many different IP addresses, clients will access the service through different paths as routed by BroadLink. If one WAN link has a service disruption, BroadLink will not reply to an inbound request with this IP, instead, automatically routing the request to an available WAN link. 2005, SOHOware, Inc. SOHOware is a registered trademarks of SOHOware, Inc. 3
Bandwidth Management 1. What is Bandwidth Management? Bandwidth Management can improve bandwidth usage efficiency. 2. What can I do with Bandwidth Management? You can control the bandwidth usage based on L3 and L4 information on both inbound and outbound traffic. 3. How can I distinguish different data flow and control them? You can give priority to different data flow such as High, Normal and Low. 4. Can I have different Bandwidth Management policies based on time of day? Yes, you can set up different bandwidth policies for different time periods, as coordinated with a pre-programmed schedule of busy vs. idle traffic periods for the given organization. 2005, SOHOware, Inc. SOHOware is a registered trademarks of SOHOware, Inc. 4
Persistent Routing 1. What is Persistent Routing? Some servers require fixed source IP addresses, and you may encounter problems cause by load balancing algorithms. Persistent Routing can help to avoid this kind of problem. 2. What will Persistent Routing do? After the route to the Internet is determined, BroadLink will then apply the persistent routing rules to the subsequent connections from the same source and destination, keeping all the subsequent connections flowing through the same WAN link. 3. How does BroadLink resolve DNS assignment across multiple WAN connections? For inbound traffic, DNS replies are made to the same WAN port as the request based on TCP/IP standards for source IP and destination IP. This applies to any WAN port of the BroadLink unit. 2005, SOHOware, Inc. SOHOware is a registered trademarks of SOHOware, Inc. 5
High Availability 1. What is High Availability? BroadLink supports a master/slave structure for device redundancy. Two BroadLink units can be deployed together as a master/slave pair. The slave will automatically take over if the master fails to ensure the continuity of network. 2. How does High Availability work? The first machine activated will be the master and the second one will be the slave. Master will handle all the traffic while the slave remains on standby. The master will constantly notify the slave of its status. If the slave does not receive the signal it knows to activate as the stand-in primary. 3. Do I have to configure slave? No, the master will auto synchronize the configuration of the slave. 2005, SOHOware, Inc. SOHOware is a registered trademarks of SOHOware, Inc. 6