OK Im going to be connecting 2 sites and want to make sure I do it as redundant as possible with what I have for equipment and connectivity. So here is what I have for hardware and connectivity.
Site 1:
2 - Cisco 3845's
1 - DS-3 to MPLS cloud
1 - 100MG optical Ethernet
Site 2:
2 - Cisco 3845's
1 - pair of Multilink T'1's to MPLS Cloud (3MG)
1 - 100MG optical Ethernet.
So in summary the sites are connected by the 100MG optical (obviously primary choice) and thru the MPLS where the bottleneck is the multilink but its for redundancy and its all I have. The MPLS uses BGP and I'm not sure what if any is being handed to me by the metro optical company for routing protocols. Regardless the two are two WAY separate companies and there is no way I can do BGP across them.
Right now as it sits my plan is to use HSRP on the 3845's at each site on the LAN.
Site 1:
RTR1 - the 100MG optical Ethernet terminates here
RTR2 - the ds-3 to the MPLS terminates here
Site 2:
RTR1 - the 100MG optical Ethernet terminates here
RTR2 - the Multilink terminates here
I'll then track the interface on the router
So on RTR1 at each site I'll track the interface that the optical Ethernet comes into (Gi0/1 respectively). If it goes down RTR2 will become the active router for HSRP.
How does this look? Anyone see any improvements or if you have a better solution scrap and rebuild with what I have or for little more cost?
Now a secondary here: For redundancy the people that are providing the metro optical Ethernet interface say they can provide us a redundant connection at each end for little cost. So rather than them handing me 1 Ethernet cable they would hand me two which would go upstream to redundant equipment. Right now I have the two Ethernet interfaces on the 3845s. One goes to the LAN and one goes to the Metro Optical. How could I make this redundant within the router? Is there another vwic for a gig card that I can add another Gig interface and create a multilink out of them? Then I could track the multilink?
Also is there a way to better track the connection. I mean in order for the tracking to work the interface has to go down. On a serial interface on a circuit terminating to a router this would be somewhat valid BUT the chances of the switch connecting to my router being the cause of the outage are not as great as something else on the optical Ethernet (in the cloud if you will). So can I somehow track the directly connected router from the other site and if I lose connectivity to that cause the failover.
