very interested
MT guys , can you please update the post if you are going to add this feature or not ?
Any updates on this topic ?
Is BGP ECMP routing on Mikrotik’s roadmap ?
Regards,
Jon
Would like to know about this as well - Maybe this is a v7 feature?
It would be really useful.
BGP multipathing can be used, for example, to turn a router into a load balancer for a cluster of servers (web, DNS, etc) and it’s a technique used in many large installations.
This article describes it very well.
http://bits.shutterstock.com/2014/05/22/stop-buying-load-balancers-and-start-controlling-your-traffic-flow-with-software/
This depends on a multipath BGP implementation that can do a flow or hash based load balancing. In a configuration like this several servers would announce the same IP address via BGP and the routers would distribute connections among them. Flow based balancing (or some kind of IP address hashing) is needed so that all the packets belonging to a TCP connection are sent to the same servers.
This technique is very cheap to implement (unless you have to use expensive routers for it) and in my opinion it’s much more reliable and scalable than the typical load balancer “magic boxes”.
So, do it, please!
Any updates on this topic ?
Is BGP ECMP routing on Mikrotik’s roadmap ?
Regards,
Any updates on this topic ?
Is BGP ECMP routing on Mikrotik’s roadmap ?
I would guess that it is all in the RouterOS v7 super duper routing code!
More than four (4) years since my initial post, and still there is no proper ECMP support …
Welcome to Mikrotik… I guess they should remove the “Router” from “RouterOS”, as it seems there had been no progress on the routing engine for years now. Instead hundreds of fixes for the wifi and access point stuff are appearing in every new ROS release. Mikrotik nowadays is a great access point and WISP supplier, but not a company I’d buy another edge/core router or switch from. Seems their focus and market orientation has changed after releasing the CCR-series. Sad story, as there would have been potential.
I’ve been wanting to see this as well, but i’d rather have recursive routing in IPv6 for BGP fixed first. 
maybe in ROS7 years after 10 I’m very impressed with the support of mikrotik for 2019, it is planned to fully transfer the kernel to devices from other manufacturers.
I solved this for me with Routing Filters under Set Next-Hop-in with multiple Gateway-Addresses. This works for me even for BGP.
Please observe, that in CISCO the max-path n does 2 things: (1) Installation of best path and (n-1) looser pathes (2) Forming an ECMP Route from the multiple routes to the same destination prefix. The first part is not needed in MikroTik, because MikroTik installs always all BGP Routes in the Routing Table, of couse not neccessarily activ. Only the second part is required and could be done manually, by routing filters or by scripts.
Second thing to observe is, you will get never ever on any router 2 routes active pointing to the same destination prefix.
But that is the idea of ECMP… have 2 or more routes for the same prefix pointing to a different path, and the router has some mechanism to use them alternately for outgoing traffic.
Sorry, for my confusing wording. I think we mean the same.
ECMP Route is for me 1 route with multiple gateways, it appears as 1 destination prefix in the table. Of course, that are 2 or more routes , but considered as 1 with respect to administrative distance.
With 2 active routes I ment 2 seperate entries in the table, and each one is marked as active, as the OP in his last post was asking, why 1 default route route is active and the second is not..
My comment is, that the second will never get active.
No issue. We mean the same.
Regards
Came to that point today and i am disappointed that mikrotik developers are not able to give us some information if that feature is on a todo list or not.
Please add my +1 vote for ECMP, too.
as a workaround, ECMP works perfectly with OSPF instead of BGP, assuming your setup allows for it.
alternatively, the tip provided by heribertos using routing filters forcing the “Next-Hop-in” to your desired multipath gateways might work, though you’ll lose the fully dynamic aspect of BGP by essentially enforcing static ECMP routes.
with that said, i’d really like to have ECMP supported in MPLS LDP. it’s really weird that it works fine with OSPF but when you run LDP on top of it it just picks whatever gateway is listed first on the route, this is terrible for load-balancing VPLS.
Thanks for this, I could workaround this issue and now working!
How have i to setup “Set In Nexthop” on Actions-Tab as @heribertos suggested?
What value have to be in there?
It is even worse. RouterOS “BGP” (I am using quotes because it is not RFC 4271 compliant) picks not just the first gateway for equal cost routes, but even for UNEQUAL cost routes, since it does not care whatsoever for IGP costs to reach the BGP next hop gateway. This not only violates RFC 4271 but essentially also means that RouterOS routes packets in an BGP or MPLS cloud essentially in a random fashion. Yes, packets reach the target, but to go from New York to Boston, RouterOS first sends you first to Los Angeles, then Seattle, detour through Chicago, and then to Boston, since its “BGP” has no understanding of the IGP topology in an AS.
With any other BGP implementation on the market (even free Open Source solutions), you get true recursive lookups of the BGP next hops within the IGP routing table including their costs, as it is described in RFC 4271. And yes, with most you even get ECMP.