Hi,

I'm trying to figure out what the best configuraton is to achieve (basic) high availability with 2 mikrotik RB2011's. Allthough VRRP is an option, I was contemplating a setup where each router has its own WAN/LAN IP and a seperate DHCP pool in the same subnet. That way if a router fails, clients could reboot, receive a new DHCP lease and connect through the other router.

I've found a few topics about high availability but no one is suggesting a similar setup, so please do tell if I'm missing something here...

Thank you!

multiple pppoe servers is another way to do it (if you're an ISP - as a LAN, pppoe would just be lame)

dynamic routing is another way, but that's mostly for routers and servers.

ethernet bonding is another tool in the toolbox....

multiple pppoe servers is another way to do it (if you're an ISP - as a LAN, pppoe would just be lame)

dynamic routing is another way, but that's mostly for routers and servers.

ethernet bonding is another tool in the toolbox....

I would like to avoid dynamic routing if possible and if I'm correct ethernet bonding is similar to LACP so restricted to a single device or stack?
What do you think of this drawing?
Thanks.

I would use (R)STP between the 2011s and the switches.
Make all 3 links = trunks.
Connect switches to each other directly using trunks as well.
Choose one of the switches as root bridge (if the Mikrotiks are root bridge, using CPU bridge, you will run into performance issues)
If you want VLANs, create them in the Mikrotiks by adding vlan subinterfaces to the bridge interfaces.
Since you're using STP, you can't use the wirespeed switch chips of the 2011 (as far as I know - if I'm wrong, someone correct me here) but must use the CPU bridge for each port.

Finally, use VRRP between the two Mikrotiks for first hop redundancy at layer 3.
If you want to balance traffic between them, I would recommend that you split your network into two LANs and make 2011-a be the primary vrrp for lan 1, and 2011-b as the the primary vrrp for lan 2.

Make each router go directly to its own ISP as default GW 1, and to the other Mikrotik for backup default GW.

Make all 3 links = trunks.
Connect switches to each other directly using trunks as well.

So ethernet bonding on Mikrotik allows for selected interfaces to be on seperate routers?
I would like the config to be as simple as possible since not all people involved have the technical skills to troubleshoot problems or replace a device in a setup with (R)STP or VRRP.

I think using VRRP alone should be sufficient. That, plus adding the other router as a gateway with higher distance, in case the router's own ISP fails.

This is enough for fallback.

If you want to also load balance, you could use PCC on both routers, where you treat the other router as if it's your second ISP. Each router should make sure to never balance requests coming from the other router though, but instead always direct them to its ISP.

If both of your ISPs can give you two IPs (sharing the same traffic), it might be easier to set up both routers with both ISPs. The exact same configuration, except the router's IP address and the VRRP settings would be used on both routers.

I have a setup very similar to this on a couple of networks, including my own. VRRP, multiple routers and multiple WAN. I also set up separate DHCP servers (putting the backup one on a delay) and it works pretty slick.

As boen_robot mentioned, setting up a basic WAN failover with recursive routing and a default route with higher cost to your other local router will cover you if one of your WANs goes down (this of course is unnecessary if you are sharing the same WAN between multiple routers).

In my case, my routers happen to be in geographically different areas with different providers, so the above works great. I use RSTP on my switching gear to handle redundant paths.