One of the most recent additions to the HSMX gateway is DHCP load-balance. This allows load-balancing of subscribers between multiple gateways. This is interesting for large environments when subscribers generate more traffic than a single physical port can handle.

Subscribers connect to the HSMX gateway over multiple interfaces, each interface will act as gateway entry point on your network. Depending on the load balancing a certain gateway address will be handed to the subscriber client device upon DHCP request.

This example will assume a large subscriber network on 192.168.15.0/24 and two subscriber interfaces.

First we need to divide up a large subscriber subnet into smaller parts. Enter your subscriber network under IP and enter the amount of networks (interfaces) and hosts (subscribers) you wish. We check our input first by reviewing the output of preview subnet. Make sure to check Auto-loadbalance and click Save. The overview now shows two subscriber subnets, assign a network interface to each, check NAT and Save changes.

Note: a small save button will appear when adjusting subscriber networks.

Add two managed subscriber networks (under Guest configuration). Make sure to assign the correct IP address to each interface. You can use Network / Subnet as reference. In our example our two networks have nice boundaries. The first available IP address in the first subnet is 192.168.15.1, the second holds 192.168.15.129. Each interface only listens to it's sub-subnet so we configure /25 or 255.255.255.128 in this case.

The last step is to enable DHCP servers. Browse to Network / DHCP and add two entries. Under the subnet dropdown should be 1 and 2 available, those are the configured subscriber networks. Auto-configuration should take care of the rest.

Depending on the network load subscribers will receive a different gateway address. On the subscriber networks we notice DHCP leases don't carry the same gateway information each time.