Convergence With Cisco OER

[maheick]

We are in the process of designing a fully redundant topology that requires automatic failover. Cisco OER seems to be a good fit however there is one requirement of the design that calls for a fast convergence. It appears as though Cisco OER has a minimum peridic timer of 3 minutes.

However, one of the main purposes of this design is to provide connectivity between our two data centers and more specifically it requires that failover be detected within 2-3 minutes. If detection takes closer to 3 minutes, we run the risk of having to go through a very manaully intensive process to regaining sync.

Internally we run EIGRP as our routing protocol. Does OER work with EIGRP to determine link availbility or are the two processes independent? What other strategies could be incorporated into the design to speed up convergence?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Press2Esc]

I have no experience & little knowledge of Cisco OER. Is this a software load balance/router protocol or is this a hardware router?

Why not consider a dual-WAN with an full-time aggregate WAN connection, load balacing and failover capability? When one WAN connection to one of the data centers is lost, you still have connectivy to the other.

Are you running a VPN or MPLS connection?

P2E

 

[maheick]

Can I still aggregate two links that are from two different service providers?

I have a multilink connection at one of my other networks, however those links are from the same provider.

It would seem as though I could since the all I need to do is share the chap hostname.

However, what I want to do in the end, once we have proven redundancy is to be able to route specific traffic over specific physical links. I think if I create a ppp multilink connection I loose this capability.

Any thoughts?

 

[maheick]

Cisco OER is load balance/fault tolerance software solution that come out in the 12.3 and is standard module in 12.4 and later. Don't quote me on the rev's but those are close.

Essentially I wanted to make sure that I wasn't only depending on reachability to make my convergence/failure detection more reobust. However, Cisco OER is more of a BGP based, setup to monitor Interet links. As such the timers don't line up with the convergence requirements.