Load balancing vs bonding and what options exist

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SvenArndt

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Hi there

So it was explained to me that load balancing and bonding are not the same thing and I understand why.

but my query revolves around the actual hardware components needed to achieve bonding. TP-Link sells load-balancing routers and all that, but I don't seem to find bonding routers anywhere easily, only companies that offer this service.

My boss wants me to do this myself, thinking it's just changing some settings on a router you purchase but is this actually possible? can someone point me in the right direction for what hardware is required and where we could actually get it?

or if it requires a third-party company who offers this, then confirm that so I can say I did my research and this was the result.
 
You're mostly wasting your time. Bonding / SD-WAN is mostly for corporate IT guys to make their bosses think they're doing something amazing ( They're not ) .

The best you can hope for is ECMP failover between two internet connections and leave it at that for redundancy / failover.

You can get a mikrotik router and use the script from here as an example:

ECMP Failover Script - MikroTik Wiki

wiki.mikrotik.com wiki.mikrotik.com
 
SvenArndt said:
Hi there

So it was explained to me that load balancing and bonding are not the same thing and I understand why.

but my query revolves around the actual hardware components needed to achieve bonding. TP-Link sells load-balancing routers and all that, but I don't seem to find bonding routers anywhere easily, only companies that offer this service.

My boss wants me to do this myself, thinking it's just changing some settings on a router you purchase but is this actually possible? can someone point me in the right direction for what hardware is required and where we could actually get it?

or if it requires a third-party company who offers this, then confirm that so I can say I did my research and this was the result.
Click to expand...

Bonding requires equipment to be installed at both your premises and the ISP's data centre, whereas load-balancing can be done on your side only. With fibre being so readily available now though, it's rare that bonding is used much. It was far more common in the ADSL days when throughput was so limited.
 
deweyzeph said:
Bonding requires equipment to be installed at both your premises and the ISP's data centre, whereas load-balancing can be done on your side only. With fibre being so readily available now though, it's rare that bonding is used much. It was far more common in the ADSL days when throughput was so limited.
Click to expand...
unfortunately, where we are moving to, there is no fiber. only rain 5G and supersonic air fibre/5G as the most viable options. its in Zonnehoewe in joburg.

so basically what you saying is unless the boss decides he wants to become his own isp as well and fork out large capital, we need to work through a third-party service.

so better to stick with a multi wan router and connect it to a Mesh network system, which was our original plan?
 
SvenArndt said:
unfortunately, where we are moving to, there is no fiber. only rain 5G and supersonic air fibre/5G as the most viable options. its in Zonnehoewe in joburg.

so basically what you saying is unless the boss decides he wants to become his own isp as well and fork out large capital, we need to work through a third-party service.

so better to stick with a multi wan router and connect it to a Mesh network system, which was our original plan?
Click to expand...

You can't do bonding without the co-operation of the ISP because equipment is required on their side to bond the 2 lines together to act as one line, and same story on your side.

Your best bet will be load-balancing, which is not ideal and has it's limitations, but at least you will be able to spread individual tcp/ip connections across the 2 lines.
 
I have a TP-link 407 loadbalancer. Used to use it a lot when routing between rain and telkom with the whole 19h thing. With Fibre, not worth the effort but its still a decent router and I actually use it versus my damn isps mikro where I have to jump through hoops for port changes. I could still loadbalance to LTE if I wanted to on it or setup as a failover, allows up to 4 WAN links.

But in this day and age, be cheaper to just up your fibre unless you really need more than a gigabit connection? I have two fibre boxes on my boundry wall so maybe one day.......
 
Speedster said:
Why do you need to bond? What is it that you want to achieve?
Click to expand...
because the boss says so. he likes anything new technology that sounds cool to try. which is fine, except when it is not possible without a genie or a large amount of capital. the goal is just to ensure we have the best possible scenario we can at the new offices, stable, fast as possible, backup when one goes down etc.
 
deweyzeph said:
You can't do bonding without the co-operation of the ISP because equipment is required on their side to bond the 2 lines together to act as one line, and same story on your side.

Your best bet will be load-balancing, which is not ideal and has it's limitations, but at least you will be able to spread individual tcp/ip connections across the 2 lines.
Click to expand...
thanks for the help
 
SvenArndt said:
because the boss says so. he likes anything new technology that sounds cool to try. which is fine, except when it is not possible without a genie or a large amount of capital. the goal is just to ensure we have the best possible scenario we can at the new offices, stable, fast as possible, backup when one goes down etc.
Click to expand...
Tell the boss bonding is old tech and all the cool kids have moved on.

Practically bonding will most likely add very little value to your setup. Load balancing should be more than sufficient for an office scenario.
 
clickingbuttons said:
You're mostly wasting your time. Bonding / SD-WAN is mostly for corporate IT guys to make their bosses think they're doing something amazing ( They're not ) .

The best you can hope for is ECMP failover between two internet connections and leave it at that for redundancy / failover.

You can get a mikrotik router and use the script from here as an example:

ECMP Failover Script - MikroTik Wiki

wiki.mikrotik.com wiki.mikrotik.com
Click to expand...

Strongly disagree here, true SD-WAN has some very compelling features which far exceeds ECMP failover
 
thanks all, so basically a tp lin 470T+, one of their archer routers(ax 1500 or similar) and a deco m5 mesh system should suffice for this then. unless someone has a what the hell are you thinking about this

can anyone suggest a decent firewall software for monitoring usage?
 
SvenArndt said:
thanks all, so basically a tp lin 470T+, one of their archer routers(ax 1500 or similar) and a deco m5 mesh system should suffice for this then. unless someone has a what the hell are you thinking about this

can anyone suggest a decent firewall software for monitoring usage?
Click to expand...
Just check the specs of the TP link. IIRC their load balancer is only 100mbps. You could look at the Edgerouter X too
 
Fusion Broadband South Africa Pty Ltd
157 Speculator Avenue
Hoogland
Randburg
South Africa

Call us direct on
+27 83 442 3396

sales @ fusionbroadband.co.za
 
We currently use their equipment. they install a device on-premises and it bonds to their DC and breaks out over internet
 
clickingbuttons said:
Such as?
Click to expand...

There is a significantly long list of value adds for SD-WAN and the metrics and analytics can easily be used to show the business value way over standard ECMP

Off the top of my head

Application and service aware traffic control with path selection based on latency, jitter, uptime, application health etc for steering and prioritization based on a huge amount of factors or scenarios (this really can be talked about for some time with so many variations and use cases)
Compression
Packet duplication based on priority (doing this well is a very under appreciated benefit)
Orchestrated decision making which can dynamically change policies or steer traffic based on scenarios outside of the SD-WAN device
Steering for security inspection, anomaly detection or on device detection
Detailed analytics based on overall traffic path, health, SLA etc
 
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Both of these typically fall under the umbrella of SD-WAN, you mention you already know the difference between the two but for brevity's sake for anyone else stumbling across this:

Bonding requires a device at the receiving end to consolidate and rebuild traffic. One session (eg, TCP connection) can use both outbound WAN interfaces to increase aggregate bandwidth.
-two 50MB links would theoretically allow a client device to aggregate the bandwidth to 100MB on a single connection.

Load balancing is having 2 or more WAN interfaces and distributing multiple sessions between them, total capacity is increased, but you are limited by the speed of each connection.
- two 50MB links will not give you 100MB on a download on a single device, it will allow you to theoretically have two client devices downloading at 50MB each. (or two sessions of 50MB)

Load balancing is easy to implement, you flip the switch on your cheap commercial router and hey presto, it uses multiple uplinks, with no requirement for a receiving endpoint (it's effectively just source-based routing)

Bonding ALWAYS requires another device on the receiving end - typically bonding is done when you have two smart WAN devices which are setup to send and receive bonded traffic. You cannot bond traffic from your home or small office to public internet services unless you use a third party over the top tunnel solution. (eg, speedify software + subscription to their 'cloud' or the above fusionBB)
Deploying it yourself requires a sender and a reciever, devices I've worked with in the past which serve this kind of function:

Riverbed
Fortinet & gate products
Silver Peak (now owned by aruba networks)

Both LB and Bonding serve to add functions of redundancy in case one connection goes down, I'd more question the why rather than the how here.

Are you working for a branch office and want to increase single-connection throughput to a head-office for something like backups or replication? - if this answer is no, you do not need bonding.

Are you working in an office and want to have multiple backup internet connections in case one goes down, but to be able to use them all at the same time for several people in an office? - if this answer is yes, you need load-balancing.

In this day and age, we are seeing bonding less and less, because why bond two 50mb connections together when you can just order one 100mb connection?

I HAVE seen bonding used more in satellite-based services for wide backups, but this is typically because you want to wan-optimize satellite connections anyway, and you might as well turn bonding on when it's built-into the wan-op appliance.

SD-WAN in itself is a whole other kettle of fish which takes the concept of failover and bonding, and applies some brains to it for things like traffic priority & forward-error-correction and such.
 
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Bonding, there's a playback from wayback.

I remember line bonding being "a thing" & many cheap-ass SA corporates deciding to drop Diginet in favor of line bonders.

Only to switch back later...

:-)
 
Faux_Grey said:
In this day and age, we are seeing bonding less and less, because why bond two 50mb connections together when you can just order one 100mb connection?
Click to expand...
Excellent summary but why order 1 x 100mbs link that can fail when you can have 2 x diverse 50mbs links that will provide a better uptime.
+ Using bonding you fusion the 2 x 50mbs together to get an aggregated 100mbs. With TCP otimization via muxing/algos/compression you can often exceed the raw capacity.
 
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