we are currently handling 4Gbps of traffic using an old cisco router, which we are removing now.
we want to use microtik due to its versatility.
confused what to buy,
CCR1072-1G-8S+
or a supermicro server with Xeon E5 Single processor 2640v4 10 cores with 2 x 3 10G NIC cards ?
The price comes to same for both.
I received a Microtik x86 routerOS license for free since i attended the MUM in thailand. That can be used in the supermicro server ?
I read somewhere Microtik CCR1072-1G-8S+ cannot handle multiple cores processing even its 72 cores ? Is it true ?
We need it to act as core router only, with 4 transit and 2 peers termination at 10G ports and will flow at max 5-7Gbps for next 3 years.
And it will be doing iBGP, MPLS, OSPF, routing mostly only.
i read in the forums, CCR1072-1G-8S+ has issues like the SFP+ ports going bad after sometime.
Is it true ?
And which version of the RouterOS, the latest is good stable or still with bugs ?
The BGP implementation on RouterOS 6 will only use one core for doing the BGP update processing. If you’re planning on having this router take a full transit table, that means that one core will be running at 100% utilisation all the time handling BGP updates… and BGP convergence time will be around 5 minutes.
Apparently things are going to be better in RouterOS 7… no idea of timescales though.
All the cores are used for routing packets between interfaces, so if you’ve got many Gbps of traffic you will see CPU usage on all the cores.
But only one core is running the BGP process, and so only one core is able to change the routing table based on BGP updates.
For example, here is one of our CCRs, where BGP is currently pegging CPU8:
On CCR, because each core is quite low-power, this means that convergence is a bit slow. On x86 you will probably find these CPUs are fast enough - other BGP implementations like BIRD are not multi-core, and they manage to converge quite quickly on x86/amd64 architectures (under a minute).
I’m not sure if routerOS x86 works with the new E5-2600v4 processors and it’s limited to 32bit and 2GB ram, so you would need to use the Cloud Hosted Router (CHR) version and run it in something like vmware’s ESXI.
It does handle multiple core processing of traffic (as far as I understand, 8 ports, each having 8 queues spread over 64 cores. The remaining cores are for system processes.
Certain things like BGP is single core I am not even sure this is an issue if you check out this BGP test - http://www.stubarea51.com/2015/07/25/mikrotik-ccr1072-1g-8s-review-part-2-bgp-performance/
I think most of the SFP+ port issues are old topics and I don’t know how many of those the ports actually went, or it was a software issue resolved in a later version of RouterOS.
Look every vendor has hardware failures and issues, unfortunately mikrotik don’t provide their failure rates (eg: 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10 000).
However, no matter what vendor or hardware you use, if it’s important (like a core router) I recommend having 2 for redundancy.
If you set on the supermicro solution, you could also look at using a E5-2600v3 processor, Intel X520 network interfaces and using something like VyOS.
I am sticking with the CCR’s, even with the BGP issues, mainly because they are fully supported by Mikrotik. I figure any future changes will be weighted toward their own hardware.
