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Support Many organisations will typically have backup network paths between the datacentre and their branches protecting against failure on their primary WAN circuits. The technology options for these backup circuits may vary from dial-up circuits such as ISDN to low speed serial circuits such as lease line or frame relay. Many organisations today use xDSL for this purpose.
An important factor in this is ensuring the backup circuit is alive and operating correctly at all times – it will be too late when the primary system goes down to then find that the backup circuit also isn’t working with a preventable problem leaving the branches disconnected from the datacentre.
The PathView software sequencers located in each branch are used by the PathView system in the datacentre to monitor the network paths between the datacentre and the branch sequencers. The PathView system reports on a variety of metrics including: latency, jitter, capacity, utilisation, and (of course) connectivity. If any of these metrics breach the predetermined thresholds then alerts are automatically issued so that remedial action can be taken if necessary.
This is all well and good for the primary circuit, but how can we monitor the backup line? The sequencer by default is installed with just one network interface. By adding an additional interface to the sequencer and monitoring systems on a VLAN dedicated to monitoring the backup route we can now test both the default and backup paths.
The diagram above shows a typical MPLS architecture with IPSec backup paths. For clarity the routing for just one branch has been detailed.
Having sequencers with two interfaces at each branch location will allow for simultaneous monitoring of either WAN type from either direction. This will provide great visibility into path performance for each scenario.
Paths are defined as a triple in PathView Premise (sequencer, target, target type).
To take advantage of the dual interface create and assign a duplicate target type for the IPSec VPN paths.
Example:
SeqA=head office
SeqB=some branch office
10.10.10.x=MPLS WAN IP numbering
172.16.1.x=IPSec WAN IP numbering
Possible Paths:
SeqA(10.10.10.x) to SeqB(10.10.10.x) using Server WAN (MPLS)
SeqA(172.16.1.x) to SeqB(172.16.1.x) using Server WAN (IPSec)
You could also perform UDP monitoring at the same time:
SeqA(10.10.10.x) to SeqB(10.10.10.x) using Server WAN (MPLS - UDP)
SeqA(172.16.1.x) to SeqB(172.16.1.x) using Server WAN (IPSec - UDP)
Furthermore, you could perform monitoring in the opposite direction…..
SeqB(10.10.10.x) to SeqA(10.10.10.x) using Server WAN (MPLS)
SeqB(172.16.1.x) to SeqA(172.16.1.x) using Server WAN (IPSec)
SeqB(10.10.10.x) to SeqA(10.10.10.x) using Server WAN (MPLS - UDP)
SeqB(172.16.1.x) to SeqA(172.16.1.x) using Server WAN (IPSec - UDP)
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