A friend of mine once brought CRS125-24G-1S-RM for his company so he was able to connect their servers on LAN and 1 WAN link. It worked well for pretty long time and everyone was happy.
As time goes by they set up PPtP and L2TP servers on the CRS125-24G-1S-RM to allow remote workers to connect. It worked well until recently they found that CPU on router is at 100% most of the time. While they see no big slow down in internet speed so far, they decided to upgrade and get another router with more CPU power. They will keep this device as a spare and use new, more powerful one as a gateway.
So the question is simple, which router is to choose? The requirements are easy to predict:
- rack-mounted,
- at least 10 eth ports (at least 9 of them to be switch-connected so servers will communicate within switch and not via CPU),
- more CPU power (I suspect it should be TILE device due to its multicore but not necessary).
They expect to have at least 150 pp2p and l2tp users right now and at least 200-250 within a year (don't ask me why they won't build or rent redundant cloud base corporate VPN system, as everyone try to save), the traffic won't be huge (single RDP within each VPN connection). Anyway, even if they have 130-150 VPNs right now I can say many warm words to CRS125's CPU!
The problem is they don't have another free space in the rack (the rack is rented and it costs a lot to rent another one just to accommodate new router) so they prefer to set 1U device and not to keep separate router and switch.
I asked them to recalculate need for ports so maybe they scale down to 8 ports (7 for servers and 1 for WAN), but even so, devices like CCR1009-8G have only 4-port switch and another 4 ports are CPU based. CCR1016-12G is good but have no switch at all. Should I worry for that or I can recommend these devices in hope that CPU will be able to handle that traffic without switch at all?
P.S. Maybe I should even recommend old-but-good RB1100AHx2 for its two switches? Will it CPU be significantly more powerful that CRS125-24G-1S-RM's one?