Meraki MX 64Load Balancing set limits

[CharlesIsWorkin]

Hi there, just a quick question and a couple thoughts I've been having. I have two internet connections coming into our MX64. One is Comcast Business Deluxe 100+ which is 100 down and 20 up, and a secondary backup TDS dsl connection at 3 down and >1 up. My question is about specifiying the values in the load balancing area of the MX64 config console.

I can use speedtest.net and sometimes get close to 115 down and 24 up, and so I was wondering about setting values in the load balancing that are higher than speeds purchased. I wouldn't want to lose a little bandwith simply because I set the limits too low, ya know? But are there perhaps negative consequences from setting values slightly above purchased numbers or speedtest numbers? 

EDIT:

1st question about the old internet speeds and load balancing has become irrelevant as it is a good idea to balance now between my 50/50 fibre and 200/10 cable connection. Especially throwing our VoIP phones on our Fibre and our guest internet on the Cable has been a great configuration.

For my 2nd question about setting speed numbers and limiting bandwith:

Limiting bandwidth numbers in the load balancing window does have an impact. Our cable company recently upgraded everyone from 100/10 to 200/10 and since I didn't change the speed in the load balancing connection speed boxes, the speed was limited to 100/10.

I have now set all the boxes about 5Mbps above what a speedtest will give me after a couple tests. That should give us the proportional and appropriate headroom to experience slightly above those advertised speeds on both connections. The cable connection can give me almost 12Mb upload and 23xMb download so I put in the connection numbers to be a little higher than that. Seems to work well.

[BlakeRichardson]

@CharlesIsWorkin You have described two different features in your question so its a little confusing, you mentioned the ADSL isa backup connection and then later on you mentioned load balancing.

IMHO load balancing with a ADSL connection would be a waste of time, usually load balancing uses either a spill over, ratio or round robin configuration. Load balancing is usually used in cases of multiple high speed WAN connections and large volumes of traffic. The idea is that your primary WAN isn't being saturated while your secondary WAN is doing nothing. 

Backup connection or WAN fail over is to cover the loss of your primary WAN connection. This is often setup alongside load balancing.

As I mentioned trying to use your ADSL connection as a speed boost isn't really worth it if the speed is only 3Mbps down.

[CharlesIsWorkin]

Hey Blake thanks for the response. Yeah sorry for the confusion, I have it set to prefer the Comcast Business link but with Load Balancing enabled currently. 

[PhilipDAth]

I presume you are only using the DSL for backup, not load balancing.

Unless you are doing QoS on your outbound traffic (like for VoIP) you might as well just set the sliders to their maximum values.

[Chad_Yates]

If you are not using traffic prioritization then as the other poster commented just set the wan values to the max.  If you are using traffic prioritization then review the guide below that explains how that works.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MX-Z/Firewall_and_Traffic_Shaping/Using_Packet_Prioritization_on_a_...

[CharlesIsWorkin]

What's your opinion's, Chad and Philip, on load balancing between the connections versus just using the main Comcast connection unless we need the DSL connection.

Because then, the connection speed would be controlled by Comcast moreso than the MX64, if I'm understanding correctly, right?

I was originally thinking about this question because our load balancing values were set low and we were capping our own download speeds by having the MX64 traffic shaping values set too low.

[PhilipDAth]

I would not load balance.  The speed difference between the two circuits is too big and will lead to poor user experience.

[CharlesIsWorkin]

Does the load balancing have too much overhead to be worth it to "add" that extra 3 down and 1 up to the overall scheme of things?

[CharlesIsWorkin]

I suppose if I turn load balancing off it won't have a terrible impact, right?

[CharlesIsWorkin · Accepted solution]

UPDATE:

Well it's fun to re-visit an old topic I started.

We are at a new building and have an MX84, 50/50 Fibre as connection 1 and 200/10 Cable as connection 2.

Load Balancing is going well, but I am responding to my question of 2 years ago.

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@CharlesIsWorkin wrote:

I suppose if I turn load balancing off it won't have a terrible impact, right?

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Yes, turning load balancing off won't have a bad impact, especially with our current uplinks.

Also, limiting bandwidth numbers in the load balancing window does have an impact. Our cable company recently upgraded everyone from 100/10 to 200/10 and since I didn't change the speed in the load balancing connection speed boxes, the speed was limited to 100/10.

I have now set all the boxes about 5Mbps above what a speedtest will give me after a couple tests. That should give us the proportional and appropriate headroom to experience those advertised speeds.