Hi all,

in the near future I will be facing temporary deployments where I want to have MikroTik as core routers and am expecting to have about 2.5 to 4 mio concurrent connections (from up to 100'000 concurrent clients) on a regular basis.
The setup will be pretty simple, up to 20 static routes, about 10 firewall rules, up to ten VLANs, 2 to 4 WAN ports, PCC load balancing.

Will a CCR1036 with 16GB do this job or should I either go for a luxury x86 deployment or wait for the CCR1072?

Thanks in advance!
-Chris

The amount of sessions only matters if you do something that needs connection tracking.
If you do simple routing this is not an issue, but if you are doing NAT, this can be an issue.

Thanks,

I kindly omitted the info that everything will be NATted and conn tracking switched on...
Sorry
-Chris

Ccr should handle it memory wise. Even with 4gb iirc linux uses about 300 bytes per connection. So 1gb free ram gives you upwards of 3 million. This is in theory not practice though. Can say what would really happen.

What is your total bandwidth requirements? You speak of 3 or 4 WAN connections in pcc, that means that you could be looking at 8gbps throughput. At those speeds over x86 hardware you need to start looking at your pcie bandwidth and the block diagram of the motherboard to make sure it can handle the load with decent latency (without maxing out the bus).

If you do go with an x86 setup be sure to use 1 four port card for the wan and a 10gb card for thr lan. Doing it that way will maximize the lanes you have available. Without looking into it too far, iirc some dual processor boards handle the pcie lanes differently than single processor boards so be sure to check out the block diagrams for any mobo you consider.

In the end I don't think that an x86 solution is a good idea in your situation. It is not going to be any cheaper than the 1036, it is going to add a "custom" layer of complexity to yohr setup and if any hardware compatability issues arrise, your screwed. Swapping out a ccr for a ccr is easy, even for a network tech in the field. Swapping out a bad stick of memory might not be.

All that being said, depending on the average packet size the 1036 should handle it.

The total bandwidth will be around 500...1000MBit, in some cases 4GBit (4x 1Gbit) on the WAN side(s).

Thanks for all your valuable feedbacks, I will give the CCR1036 1ith 16GB a try.
As soon as I did my first setup with this, I will report.

Thanks all!
-Chris