Multiple Circuits shown as one - network load balancing

Hey all, I’m new to the forum, but have been watching the LTS videos for quite some time. I finally decided to get on here to ask some questions to see what help I can get. I hope this forum helps out a lot.

I have a massive network and one of my circuits is a set of six (6) with fifty (50) meg pipes each. Obviously it’s a total of 300 megs that I need to do business over this long-haul dedicated circuit. When we do an alternate route because of degradation, I want to make sure that the circuit doesn’t move back to that primary (the one with six lines) until all of the lines are back up. So what I was thinking about was playing around with some sort of load balancer, if it exists.

I would need a solution that shows itself as one circuit. If any of those six go down, the circuit would then show as not available. When the circuit comes back up, it would need to be available only when all six of those pipes are back up and running.

Does anyone know of any solutions that would fit this bill?

In what form do you want to accomplish this? You have 6 IP’s @ 50M, and you want them what, combined into one, or a just used as 6 round robin paths?

It’s not round robin. It’s 6 separate IPs that take 50 megs each and combine them into a 300mb pipe. Just like if you were to have more than one ISP line into your house, and you combine them to get greater bandwidth.

So what are you currently using to swap between the 6x50 and your backup connection? What is your backup connection?

If you want to combine them, you would need an SD WAN solution to aggregate the bandwidth.

Thank you for mentioning the SD WAN. I will research that today and see what assets we have. I’m assuming that I can create a test network for this. Can you suggest hardware for implementation?

There are a lot of vendors that offer it https://packetpushers.net/virtual-toolbox/list-sd-wan-vendors/

Awesome, thank you. I’ll be looking into these today. Much appreciated

What is at the other end of these 50Mbps pipes? Or do you not have anything yet? When you say “goes down” what do you mean by that? I know it sounds like a dumb question, but here’s where I’m going with this. If only only want the circuit to be in use if all 300Mbps is available and not 250Mbps, it’s possible to have a circuit where a ping will still go across, but traffic in general won’t route or something.

Back in the day of T1’s when we would multiplex them failing out of a T was challenging because of scenarios like that. This is pretty much what you’re trying to do is to MUX 6 channels.

With all that said, you might want to talk to the guys at fatpipe.com I have used their appliances when I had multiple inbound IPs and needed DNS to automatically route based on load, etc. I’m pretty sure they could handle your scenario.

That sounds like a good company to have in my tool kit! Thank you for the suggestion, and I very much like the similar situation with the T1 line… brings back memories!

In this case, it looks like my engineers want to use a setting called concatenation. I have not done any configurations with this, so it might be fun to learn. You are correct about the pinging, but I’m actually talking about hard-line breaks. We pay particular attention to the actual jump points, and keep track of any maintenance going on along that path. That’s where the alt-route comes in where we can find a different physical path.

For this forum: I am highly impressed with the attention that I got on this problem set. Thank you for all of your responses! I think this will be one of my new go-to forums for my interesting situations. Thanks again!