I would like to ask here, because I have no experience from BGP at all. We are having a MikroTik CCR1009-7G-1C-1S+ in a datacenter and we want to advertise a /24 IPv4 block and a /29 IPv6 block via our own router and our own ASN.
The datacenter will announce our end a full BGP table and they advised us to make sure that our router can handle it.
I have two major questions:
First of all if the router we have is able to handle this. I have heard that the BGP is hungry for CPU. Can you advise me on this issue? Do you think I need a better router or can I do my job with it? And if so, which one do you recommend?
What do I need to do this configuration. Since I have no experience with BGP, do you know where I could find a tutorial or a good guide to learn how to set up this service on MikroTik?
Thank you very much in advance for your time and your valuable help.
First of all if the router we have is able to handle this. I have heard that the BGP is hungry for CPU. Can you advise me on this issue? Do you think I need a better router or can I do my job with it? And if so, which one do you recommend?
I believe that the CCR-1009 could handle it, but it will be slower than a more powerful router. A CCR-2004 running V7 RouterOS for example would crunch the full BGP table faster. Also, unless there is some compelling reason that you need the full BGP routing table, why not tell the data center to send only the default route instead of the full BGP routing table. This is what we did.
What do I need to do this configuration. Since I have no experience with BGP, do you know where I could find a tutorial or a good guide to learn how to set up this service on MikroTik?
It depends on what version of RouterOS you intend to use. The configuration is slightly different between V6 and V7. We have used both V6 and V7 for this with success. There are plenty of tutorials on BGP available, but you need to decide which version of RouterOS you intend to use first.
Thanks a lot for your answer and your time. The CCR1009 I have has currently a version 7.2.3, so I am thinking that I would like to keep the latest version, even if I upgrade to a CCR2004, as suggested. I only noticed that the CCR2004 has only SFP ports, which means that the connection to the switches should be also with fiber. Our switches have SFP ports as well, so I suppose that will not be a problem.
As for the BGP table, if it will be “full” or not, that is something I don’t know. As explained, I have no experience of BGP and that was actually the proposal of the datacenter (Hetzner). I am not sure if they will do what suggested by you (sending only the default route instead of the full BGP routing table). I have to ask them.
Is there any possibility to send me any links of good tutorials about BGP? As I said, I would like to do it with RouterOS V7.
If you’re single-homed (meaning only 1 upstream ISP advertising BGP), then you’ll very likely only need a default route, which in your case the 1009 should suffice