First, I am not doing fail-over. I want to be able to add another ISP link using a HWIC-4ESW.
Equipment: Cisco 3825(1GB ram, 2GB flash, IOS 15.4 Advanced Enterprise services) with HWIC-4ESW available.
Currently doing Router on a stick with Gi0/1 to a managed switch with current ISP on Gi0/0. I need to add a second link to the same ISP(they dont provide any more bandwidth per link, other ISP's in area do not provide anything better either). My ISP does not allow bonding on these links, but does allow load balancing if I do it on my router.
I have a few options: 1) use a switch to join both ISP provide modems before the router. (not the best solution, but workable) 2) use a HWIC-4ESW I have laying around and try to use it. ( prefered method as I have the HWIC on hand) 3) spend the money on a HWIC-2FE and use layer3 routing. (the best way, but also costly. Will solve the issue now but I will have to buy more hwic-2fe's as I add) 4) Use the Router on a stick config to provide layer3 routing to the other vlans and control access using ACLs. (also workable, but not prefered as ISP traffic is not and can not be tagged or it gets dropped. 5) use a linux server to provide balancing and aggregation then forward to router (uses 2 of my limited static IP addresses (/29))
My question is if I can get option 2 to work and how I would set it up? If option 2 will not work please make suggestions based on the other options available.
Thanks