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What is a load balancing router?

Vishvas Sudarshan
By Vishvas Sudarshan
in Networking
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So I bought this router because I needed to connect two ISP, one primary and backup (enabled only when primary fails)

 

Now I know how to configure all that, but I want to know what 'load balancing' is.

 

If enabled, will it send some data through WAN 1 and some through WAN 2? If so, wouldn't services such as online banking be affected if the IP address keeps changing during an online transaction? 

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21 minutes ago, Vishvas Sudarshan said:

So I bought this router because I needed to connect two ISP, one primary and backup (enabled only when primary fails)

 

Now I know how to configure all that, but I want to know what 'load balancing' is.

 

If enabled, will it send some data through WAN 1 and some through WAN 2? If so, wouldn't services such as online banking be affected if the IP address keeps changing during an online transaction? 

Usually when dealing with this kind of routers you can put in firewall/nat/routing rulesets so that for specific services wan 1 or wan 2 are only used...

 

For example the ip of the bank only is contacted over WAN1, so it will never try to go out of WAN2. 

 

But this is with the devices I worked with. 

Main System:

Anghammarad : Asrock Taichi x570, AMD Ryzen 7 5800X @4900 MHz. 32 GB DDR4 3600, some NVME SSDs, Gainward Phoenix RTX 3070TI

 

System 2 "Igluna" AsRock Fatal1ty Z77 Pro, Core I5 3570k @4300, 16 GB Ram DDR3 2133, some SSD, and a 2 TB HDD each, Gainward Phantom 760GTX.

System 3 "Inskah" AsRock Fatal1ty Z77 Pro, Core I5 3570k @4300, 16 GB Ram DDR3 2133, some SSD, and a 2 TB HDD each, Gainward Phantom 760GTX.

 

On the Road: Acer Aspire 5 Model A515-51G-54FD, Intel Core i5 7200U, 8 GB DDR4 Ram, 120 GB SSD, 1 TB SSD, Intel CPU GFX and Nvidia MX 150, Full HD IPS display

 

Media System "Vio": Aorus Elite AX V2, Ryzen 7 5700X, 64 GB Ram DDR4 3200 Mushkin, 1 275 GB Crucial MX SSD, 1 tb Crucial MX500 SSD. IBM 5015 Megaraid, 4 Seagate Ironwolf 4TB HDD in raid 5, 4 WD RED 4 tb in another Raid 5, Gainward Phoenix GTX 1060

 

(Abit Fatal1ty FP9 IN SLI, C2Duo E8400, 6 GB Ram DDR2 800, far too less diskspace, Gainward Phantom 560 GTX broken need fixing)

 

Nostalgia: Amiga 1200, Tower Build, CPU/FPU/MMU 68EC020, 68030, 68882 @50 Mhz, 10 MByte ram (2 MB Chip, 8 MB Fast), Fast SCSI II, 2 CDRoms, 2 1 GB SCSI II IBM Harddrives, 512 MB Quantum Lightning HDD, self soldered Sync changer to attach VGA displays, WLAN

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14 minutes ago, Anghammarad said:

Usually when dealing with this kind of routers you can put in firewall/nat/routing rulesets so that for specific services wan 1 or wan 2 are only used...

 

For example the ip of the bank only is contacted over WAN1, so it will never try to go out of WAN2. 

 

But this is with the devices I worked with. 

That's nice, so let's say I disable load balancing, then all data will be sent only through WAN 1? (If I've set that as Primary WAN)  

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Should do so, yes. Depending on no fault being in the system :P

 

Main System:

Anghammarad : Asrock Taichi x570, AMD Ryzen 7 5800X @4900 MHz. 32 GB DDR4 3600, some NVME SSDs, Gainward Phoenix RTX 3070TI

 

System 2 "Igluna" AsRock Fatal1ty Z77 Pro, Core I5 3570k @4300, 16 GB Ram DDR3 2133, some SSD, and a 2 TB HDD each, Gainward Phantom 760GTX.

System 3 "Inskah" AsRock Fatal1ty Z77 Pro, Core I5 3570k @4300, 16 GB Ram DDR3 2133, some SSD, and a 2 TB HDD each, Gainward Phantom 760GTX.

 

On the Road: Acer Aspire 5 Model A515-51G-54FD, Intel Core i5 7200U, 8 GB DDR4 Ram, 120 GB SSD, 1 TB SSD, Intel CPU GFX and Nvidia MX 150, Full HD IPS display

 

Media System "Vio": Aorus Elite AX V2, Ryzen 7 5700X, 64 GB Ram DDR4 3200 Mushkin, 1 275 GB Crucial MX SSD, 1 tb Crucial MX500 SSD. IBM 5015 Megaraid, 4 Seagate Ironwolf 4TB HDD in raid 5, 4 WD RED 4 tb in another Raid 5, Gainward Phoenix GTX 1060

 

(Abit Fatal1ty FP9 IN SLI, C2Duo E8400, 6 GB Ram DDR2 800, far too less diskspace, Gainward Phantom 560 GTX broken need fixing)

 

Nostalgia: Amiga 1200, Tower Build, CPU/FPU/MMU 68EC020, 68030, 68882 @50 Mhz, 10 MByte ram (2 MB Chip, 8 MB Fast), Fast SCSI II, 2 CDRoms, 2 1 GB SCSI II IBM Harddrives, 512 MB Quantum Lightning HDD, self soldered Sync changer to attach VGA displays, WLAN

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52 minutes ago, Anghammarad said:

Usually when dealing with this kind of routers you can put in firewall/nat/routing rulesets so that for specific services wan 1 or wan 2 are only used...

 

For example the ip of the bank only is contacted over WAN1, so it will never try to go out of WAN2. 

 

But this is with the devices I worked with. 

 

36 minutes ago, Vishvas Sudarshan said:

That's nice, so let's say I disable load balancing, then all data will be sent only through WAN 1? (If I've set that as Primary WAN)  

You can also do session splitting across multiple WANs to split the load, there's different ways of doing it and some are rather basic but at least you don't have to create explicit rules for traffic. You can combine both methods together as well.

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