A Primer on Link Load Balancing (LLB)
The link load balancer uses pools to increase your available bandwidth, maximize throughput, and add redundancy. It combines the capacity of multiple external connections and balances the data requests across them proportionately. You can only apply this to external connections. It works with traffic generated from services running on the Smoothwall Filter and Firewall itself, such as the Guardian Web Filter, and supports all external connection types, including dynamic DHCP and PPPoE.
This does not support Bonding, whereby multiple connections are presented as one. Bonding requires special equipment at both ends of the connection. However, your ISP might provide this.
Configuring Link Load Balancing for Greater Bandwidth.
- Navigate to Network > Configuration > Interfaces - Set two physical interfaces to 'External' mode and add the public IP address, subnet mask, gateway address and target bandwidth to the interfaces relevant to each link.
For more details, see Smoothwall Filter & Firewall: Adding or Altering External Connections - Navigate to Network > Configuration > Link Load Balancing.
- Click Add new LLB pool.
- Name the new LLB Pool and under Target bandwidth select Use maximum bandwidth.
- Click Add to save the new LLB Pool
- Click the blue 'down' arrow on the newly created LLB pool and click Add new connection.
- Select from Local addresses an address from the first External link you have set up and click Add.
- Repeat the last step to add an IP from the second link, and for any further external links you may have.
- Once you have added an entry from each External interface, you may drag them into an order of priority if required.
- Navigate to Network > Configuration > Source NAT & LLB Rules
- You can now set the new LLB Pool as the LLB Pool/Gateway for any Source NAT policy, or against any Smoothwall Service such as Guardian, as well as the Default LLB Pool to be used against multiple objects using the Default LLB pool.
- Navigate to Network > Configuration > DNS
- Ensure your DNS Forwarders are set to use the new LLB Pool or Default LLB pool.
Configuring Link Load Balancing for Link Redundancy.
- Navigate to Network > Configuration > Interfaces - Set two physical interfaces to 'External' mode and add the public IP address, subnet mask, gateway address and target bandwidth to the interfaces relevant to each link.
For more details, see Smoothwall Filter & Firewall: Adding or Altering External Connections
NOTE: Please ensure 'Connection monitoring' is enabled on each external interface in the IP Configuration wizard. - Navigate to Network > Configuration > Link Load Balancing.
- Click Add new LLB pool.
- Name the new LLB Pool and under Target bandwidth select User defined and enter a value that represents the highest bandwidth available on any one link. For example, if you have two links of 100mbps and 50mbps respectively, set the unit to mbps and enter 100.
- Click Add to save the new LLB Pool
- Click the blue 'down' arrow on the newly created LLB pool and click Add new connection.
- Select from Local addresses an address from the first External link you have set up and click Add.
- Repeat the last step to add an IP from the second link, and for any further external links you may have.
- Once you have added an entry from each External interface, ensure they are ordered in terms of priority, typically with the highest bandwidth link at the top, and smaller bandwidth links following.
- Navigate to Network > Configuration > Source NAT & LLB Rules
- You can now set the new LLB Pool as the LLB Pool/Gateway for any Source NAT policy, or against any Smoothwall Service such as Guardian, as well as the Default LLB Pool to be used against multiple objects using the Default LLB pool.
- Navigate to Network > Configuration > DNS
- Ensure your DNS Forwarders are set to use the new LLB Pool or Default LLB pool.