Hi all:

I have searched this forum and the documentation, and didn't find what I am looking for... I don't know if this is feasible or not.

My situation:

I am using a MT box right now to serve out several different hotspots (one hotspot per VLAN) to my customers. So far it works fine, and I can handle a few hundred users without breaking a sweat. However, I need to come up with a plan to make this system scale to handle 10 times the users, perhaps more.

My first thought was to strip away the hotspots to several different MT boxes, so instead of serving 10 hotspots from one MT box, I would have say 5 MT boxes, each serving 2. I also want fail-over (i.e. VRRP), so that would bump my number of MT boxes up to 10 (5 acting as primary, 5 as hot stand-by).

Then it occured to me... can I do some kind of load balancing, kind of like CARP (OpenBSD) or uCARP (linux) with RouterOS? Ideally, I would have a "cluster" or MT boxes, and they can load balance amongst themselves to spread the load, so I can just add more MT boxes as I need to, to handle the user load.

The other approach is to throw a hardware layer 2 load balancer in front of the MT boxes, but that's another point of failure. I guess what I am wanting to find out is if I can do a "soft" load balancer in MT itself.

I hope this makes sense... any help is greatly appreciated

you could try a front end per connection, round robin load balancing.. I think there are things in the wiki to show how to do this...

basically you're doing the same thing as if someone wanted to load balance 2 DSL lines, you have to ensure that each connection is maintained across the same DSL line, in your case, the same hotspot server, and instead of per connection, you want per IP...