Loab Balancing: does it really work ?

[SAMHINDI]

Hello everyone, 

Has anybody tried the Meraki MX series load balance feature over 2 WANs ? 

I am checking the Live Usage through the iphone App, it seems to be focusing on primary WAN and the other WAN2 seems to be dormant all the time even WAN1 is fully consumed, maybe this due to sessions already opened in WAN1 or I need to do anything extra to utilize Load Balancing ? 

Thanks for help. 

[Adam]

We use it and here are a few things to check:

1. Security Appliance>Traffic Shaping, set the WAN1 and WAN2 speeds so it knows how much it has available on each WAN interface.  This will help the overall balancing.
2. Set the primary uplink to whichever is your best WAN interface
3. Make sure Load Balancing is Enabled (I've missed this before)
4. Check internet traffic flow preferences since specifying those will only use one interface

One last thing worth keeping in mind.  The MX will only use one interface per flow.  So if a user starts a large download it won't balance that across both WAN interfaces.  Whichever one it was using when it started the download is what it'll use to finish the download.  

[jdsilva]

Here's from one of my sites:

It seems to work pretty well there. Double check all the stuff @Adam mentioned in case you have a mis-config. 

[SAMHINDI]

Thank you all for your replies, I have managed to make it work, the only thing was , I've directed traffic (via traffic preference) of some servers to WAN1 which lead all the network to be directed to WAN1 , I guess this option only works for all the sub net even if you specify a certain IP.

So when I've removed the preference , all worked like a charm!

Flow preferences

Internet traffic