Load balance traffic over two T-1's

[penguinroundup]

I recently acquired a second t-1 pipe to the internet that I need to get hooked up to my existing router (a 2610 running image 2600-i-mz.120-7.T.bin - yes I know it's ancient!) I'm not running any routing protocols at the moment - just using static routes.

When I connect the second T-1, will the router automatically load-balance the traffic once it sees both pipes, or do I need to implement some type of routing protocol (e.g. BGP) to make this happen?

thanks,

 

[KiscoKid]

A dynamic routing protocol is better as it's much more likely to track an upstream failure than a static route.

That said static routing is very simple to setup and can provide fundamental load-balancing if you create 2 routes with an equal metric and point them to the respective far-end WAN routers.

Just for your awareness, that current image you have won't support BGP. You'll likely need to upgrade to IP Plus to get that feature.

 

[JOAMON]

Are both T1 lines from the same provider??

 

[penguinroundup]

Yes, both pipes are from the same ISP, but they each terminate at different access routers on the ISP side - one terminates in our city (Indianapolis), and the other is connected to an access router in Chicago.

My second circuit is now turned up, but I'm not sure how to tell how much (or if any) traffic is being passed over that circuit. My default route is set to "circuit 1", so wouldn't all traffic go out that way instead of being load-balanced?

 

[JOAMON]

Think you are going to have to upgrade the IOS you have in order to do this. I think with a newer IOS you can enable IP CEF and setup equal cost paths and the router should do the rest. The default IP CEF forwarding method is per destination and with that older equipment would be the better choice as per packet is far more CPU intensive. If you want to try per packet make sure to monitor the CPU load during peak useage and watch for it to max out. Do this with the show process cpu history command. For more information on CEF see the following link:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products...figuration_guide_chapter09186a00800ca6ca.html

 

[tangostar]

you're going to have to do some policy based routing. When last I looked at this situation it was necessary.