Balancing Traffic Loads Over Equal-Cost Routes - Novell NETWARE 6-DOCUMENTATION Manual

Balancing Traffic Loads over Equal-Cost Routes

Table 4
92
Internetwork Packet Exchange
If a NLSP router has two or more network interfaces with routes to the same
destination, it can distribute outbound traffic among those interfaces for an
effective increase in throughput. This is called load balancing or load sharing
.
NLSP uses an assigned path cost to select the best route by which to forward
outbound IPX packets. The higher the throughput of the network medium, the
lower the cost of the route.
Table 4 shows the throughput range and default cost of some typical network
media.
Throughput Range and Default Cost of Typical Network Media
Throughput Range
0-16 Kbps
48-64 Kbps
64-128 Kbps
1-2 Mbps
2-4 Mbps
4-8 Mbps
10-16 Mbps
16-32 Mbps
64-128 Mbps
You can specify up to eight equal-cost routes to a single destination with the
Maximum Number of Path Splits parameter. Two routes are equal in cost if
the cost to the destination is the same for both routes. To equalize the costs of
two interfaces, you set their Cost Override parameter to the same value. By
default, Cost Override is set to 0 for all interfaces, which means that NLSP
uses the default cost associated with the connected medium and throughput
range listed in Table 4
Default Cost Typical Network Media
61 9,600-baud line
45 ISDN (U.S.)
45 ISDN (Europe)
27 Corvus Omninet (1 Mbps), T1 (1.5
Mbps)
26 E1 (2 Mbps), ARCnet (2.5 Mbps)
25 Token ring (4 Mbps), Corvus Omninet
(4 Mbps)
20 Ethernet (10 Mbps)
19 Token ring (16 Mbps)
14 FDDI (100 Mbps), CDDI (100 Mbps)
.