Introduction
The service providers deploy multiple tools and load-balance the subscriber's traffic for monitoring due to the volume of the traffic. If each proble were to have a single link, any link failure would trigger traffic redistribution among the active tools. Considering that link failures are quite common, service providers may choose to deploy probes with additional links to achieve link-level redundancy. In which case, the service provider would expect the same probe to monitor the subscribers traffic untill all its links fail. Such a deployment would require load-balancing the traffic at two-levels (nested load-balancing), one at the probe level and the other at the link-level (for each probe). Gigamon's Subscriber Intelligence Solution can load-balance the traffic among multiple probes. This GVD build on that capability to demonstrate deploying the solution to meet the above requirement.
Design Overview
This GVD presumes a service provider's 3G/4G mobile core network, as illustrated in the following topology, comprising of two GigaVUE-HC3 devices are deployed in a cluster. One of the GigaVUE-HC3 devices is equipped with a single GigaSMART engine for GTP correlation and load-balancing. The subscribers traffic, both control and user, is tapped from interfaces like S11 and S1-U and is fed to the GigaSMART engine for GTP correlation post which the traffic is sampled, load-balanced based on subscriber's ID (IMSI) across GigaStreams (GS1-4) associated with the port-group PG1 and load-balanced based on 5-tuples across the ports attached with each GigaStream.
Figure 1: Gigamon's subscriber-aware filtering and Nested load-balancing solution
To learn more about this solution, read complete details on the Gigamon Community: Enabling-Seamless-Inspection-of-the-Subscribers-Traffic-During-Link-Failover-5-12.
