setup 1 LAN network over 2 WAN internet connections

[andyJJam]

I have 2 high speed broadband lines going into a Draytek vigor router. I want to use one for computers etc and one for iPBX phones as well as load balancing when the main fiber line is overloaded. I just cant work out how to assign the phones to use a different wan without creating two separate VLANs for the office.

any help would be great!

Thanks

 

[noidea_77]

Well, separating the traffic and different routings are two major reasons for VLANs. What's the problem with it?

 

[andyJJam]

Well, separating the traffic and different routings are two major reasons for VLANs. What's the problem with it?

I don't want them to be split over different iP's I want them to all live on 192.168.1.xxx so that I can access the phones from my desktop.

FYI my abilities are in the 'Enthusiastic Amateur' category.

 

[bill001g]

I have not used that particular router and unfortunately what features it does or does not have will be key.

You really should have a separate vlan for voice it tends reduce the strange random call quality errors you see in a network. Most IP phones and commercial grade switches can use a protocol called LACP to auto assign phones to the proper vlan without you worrying about where they are plugged in.

So you first issue is identifying the traffic. You could have the phone mark the traffic with a QoS tag. It is common to use what is called a marking called EF for voice but you could use anything you want since it is your network. The load balancer could then use the QoS tags to select traffic. Another more general way is to match either SIP or H323 control protcols and all UDP trafffic using ports 16k-32k. Not always the most accurate since other things use these UDP ports.

Now lets assume you have figured out how to identify the traffic. What you need to do is define certain amount of guaranteed bandwidth on both circuits...you must assume that at some time you may fail over. Because of this you want the bandwidth to be guaranteed to the voice if it needs it but be available to your other traffic if it is not needed. Most consumer routers cannot do this so hopefully your device can. Next you need to define how you want the load balancing to work.. mostly this is going to depend on what types of traffic you have.

I suspect the hardest issue you will have is actually getting traffic to load balance. One key issue is that traffic is flow/session based. Because you have 2 different IP addresses you must keep all traffic related to one session on the same NAT ip. This may be multiple traffic flows to multiple server ip addresses. A example would be a banking session where your PC may talk to a number of servers that may be on different IP in different locations. These servers talk to each other to ensure security so if your IP would suddenly change as you moved server to server they would likely drop your session. Most load balancers can not solve this issue so they will end up sending all traffic from a source IP out the same connection. The other issue is most traffic is inbound on home and office traffic. The load balancer can only really balance outbound traffic.

 

[andyJJam]

Thanks for that answer.
I think I need to get googling to understand some of it. The reason I got the second fibre line is that the iP Phones were dropping out every few seconds. I will look at the VLAN route to try to solve this and let you know how I get on.

Thanks!

 

[bill001g]

Sorry put the wrong thing in it is LLDP not LACP that is used to negotiate the vlan numbers. If you use a different vlan it make it much easier to identify traffic since it is in a different subnet. Using 2 subnets in your office should have no impact with your ability to access the devices