L2 redundant VPN

Mon Jan 21 21:37:55 UTC 2013

Hi networking guys,

    I need some help :-). We try to find for our department reliable
solution for L2 VPN. The task is to connect two remote data centers,
each of them connected two 1Gbps  lines (with link aggregation). Only IP
connectivity between data centers is available (so there is no
possibility to create circuit based on MPLS or something like that). The
basic problem is that high reliability is required, so the solution have
to be fully redundant.

The initial idea was about two OpenVPN servers in each data center + two
switches (HP E5800) joined into one logical switch via VRF. The link
failure is based on LACP packets between both data centers.  The
solution works, however performance of OpenVPN is really creepy. The
maximum we were able to get from this configuration was about 100Mbps.
We expect at least 500Mbps (or more in the future).

In our thoughts then we were thinking about l2tp on some cisco/HP(H3C)
device, however there is little information about performance of that
solution and I am not sure how the failure detection would work in
redundant configuration.

Have anybody some experience with similar solution or at least any idea ?

Thanks a lot for thoughts

    Tomas