Contents
Multi-WAN (MWAN) provides outbound traffic balancing and failover across multiple WAN links. It comes as a default feature for RansNet product Family. Added onto mbox powerful performance and multiple GE ports, MWAN offers a simple and cost-effective choice for enterprises to efficiently aggregate the total bandwidth available from multiple upstream ISP links with the highest resiliency. If you have multiple internet connections and want to fully utilize the total available bandwidth with failover, or even control which traffic goes through which WAN link, mbox is the ideal choice for this type of requirement.
You can do load-balancing based on weights between links (weights are relative to each WAN link capacity), or just do failover with multiple levels of primary and backup interfaces. For example, Different sources can have different primary or backup WANs, eg. group 1 use WAN1 as primary and WAN2 as backup; group2 use WAN1 as backup and WAN2 as primary etc.
In summary, MWAN does below:
- provides outbound WAN traffic load balancing over multiple WAN links based on weight assignment. It also supports specific outbound traffic rules to customize which outbound connections should use which WAN link, based on source IP, destination IP, destination port(s), protocols, etc (is like PBR with failover support).
- monitors each WAN connection using repeated ping tests (to each interface default gateway only) and can automatically failover outbound traffic to other alive interfaces if one interface loses connectivity.
- supports unlimited WAN links (the limit is the available hardware GE interfaces!)
NOTE
If you have multiple internet connections and want to fully utilize the total available bandwidth with failover, or even control which traffic goes through which WAN link, RansNet Appliances is the ideal choice for this type of requirement.
With RansNet Appliance, you can configure to add the Gateway Ethernet Interfaces as a member of the MWAN group of the Host within the selected entity.
Prerequisites:
- More than one Gateway Ethernet Interface must be pre-configured:
- With WAN access.
- With Multi-WAN Group. See Settings of Ethernet Interface (02. Multi-WAN Group) Link
NOTE
To enable Multi-WAN Group: The user has to configure a minimum of two Interface for MWAN Group in the ‘Ethernet Interface (‘Network > Ethernet Interfaces’) and enable the Multi-WAN Group section with relevant settings as per the user requirement.
Multi-WAN Interface
User can access the Multi-WAN interface from the dropdown menu of the 
tab when editing the Gateway. User can click the number in the ‘Rule No.’ column to edit it.
The fields of the Multi-WAN List are explained below:
| S/N | Fields | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 01. | Rule No | Rule number identifies different traffic steering policies, in top down approach. eg. traffic with lower rule number is processed first. |
| 02. | Interface | Displays the Group number configured in the Gateway > Ethernet Interface |
| 03. | Link Metric | Displays the link route metric used for the link balancing algorithm. If all links have the same metric, it means traffic will be load balanced (all links actively passing traffic); if links have a different metrics, the lower metric link will be the primary link. |
| 04. | Link Weight | Displays the weights used for link balancing (when all links have the same metric). If all link have the same weight, traffic will be equally load-balanced out from all interfaces, else traffic will be split proportionally according to the weights configured. |
| 05. | Tracked Host/Interval/Attempts | Displays upstream host tracking config. |
| 06. | Action | Displays the delete icon to delete the particular MWAN rule. |
New MWAN Interface
To create new MWAN , click on the 
button as in Image 1.
The fields of the Multi-WAN List are explained below:
| S/N | SECTION | FIELDS | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01. | New / Edit MWAN Rule | ||
| 1.1 | Rule No | Rule number to identify the MWAN Rule NOTE: Rule number cannot be replicated | |
| 02. | New Interface | ||
| 2.1 | Select Interface | Interface to configure mwan | |
| 2.2 | Link Metric / Weight | configure the mwan metric and weight | |
| 2.3 | Tracked Host / Interval / Attempts | This command tracks upstream host availability with interval and no of times for failure | |
| 03. | MWAN Rule (Options) | ||
| 3.1 | Application Protocol | Configures traffic matching criteria for each policy. | |
| 3.2 | User Source IP / Netmask | Configures traffic matching criteria for each policy. | |
| 3.3 | Destination IP / Netmask | Configures traffic matching criteria for each policy. |
Settings of MWAN Rule
The New/Edit MWAN Rule Page consists of two sections as listed below:
- Edit MWAN Rule, and
- MWAN Rule (Options)
Pls, see Table 1 above for the explanation of the fields.