Duel WAN Connections Failover

[BrianC1]

We have two physical sites with their own Internet connection. There is a fiber connection between the two sites. We would like each site to be able to use it's Internet connection unless there is an outage. If there is an outage we would like to direct traffic over the fiber link and out the other sites Internet connection. We have thought about using VRRP and routing protocols, but do not see a solution there. Both sites are using Procurve 5400. Any help would be appreciated.

[Vince-Whirlwind]

Assuming each site uses private IP addressing internally, then on each site's "core", you could add in a second default route (pointing at the remote site's "core"), with a higher cost.

This only works if the target IP address of the existing default route actually becomes unavailable..

In other words, if your default route points to your WAN provider's CPE router, then this would only work if your link to the CPE router was removed, or if your switch interrface linked to the CPE router went down, or if the CPE router interface went down, or if the CPE router went down.

So with HP5400s, unless one of the above scenarios was the cause of the local WAN outage, you would need to manually disable your WAN-facing interface for the backup default route to kick in.

With Comware you would use quality assurance to track the status of the link.
With Cisco, you use IP SLA monitor.
With Procurve, it's either manual intervention, or you use dynamic routing.