SonicWALL OS 2.x quick start WAN-WAN Load Balancing & Fail Over, WAN Failover

Sonic OS 2.x Quick Start Guide

WAN-WAN Load Balancing & Fail Over

SonicOS Enhanced provides the capability to connect two WAN links and configure them for Load Balancing and/or Fail Over. This is the perfect feature for customers who want to back up their T1 lines with DSL or Cable. The dual WAN links can be setup either as Active-Active or Active- Passive. Depending on your customer’s requirements, you’ll need to determine which set up best fits their needs.

Active-Active This provides outbound load balancing between the two WAN links based on one of the three available algorithms. Inbound load balancing is not directly supported. However, selected services (E-Mail and VPN) can be configured to failover from one WAN link to the other. These two scenarios require static IP addresses on both WAN links.

Link states can be monitored in one of two ways. By default, each WAN link will be monitored at the physical level. For most applications, customers will also want to configure Probe Monitoring, which adds monitoring at a logical level using either TCP connection requests or ICMP. This allows a failure of an upstream device to be detected.

Active-Passive Only the Primary WAN link is active, unless a link failure is detected. Although the Secondary link is unused except during a failure of the Primary, greater redundancy can be achieved for inbound traffic. For example, a third-party dynamic DNS client could be used to ensure that DNS records always reflect the currently active WAN link.

WAN Failover

In order to configure the Failover and Load Balancing feature, you must first configure the second WAN interface and assign it to the WAN Zone. For our example, the Secondary WAN is an xDSL line with a dynamic IP via PPPoE. You’ll need to configure your Secondary WAN based on the type of connection your customer provides.

On the Pro 4060, configure the settings as follows:

1.From the GUI, select the NETWORK button and then WAN Failover & LB.

2.To enable outbound load balancing, click the enable checkbox. With only this checkbox enabled, the Sonicwall only tests the physical link status.

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