Question - why is the license on a CHR ROS 64-bit (running on AMD or Intel CPU) different than a license on an x86 ROS 32-bit (running on AMD or Intel CPU ?
This is off topic here. But to answer your question, this is so you can move the license to other virtual systems. x86 license was bound to the installation, so if you wanted another one, you had to pay again. In this case, you can simply remove the license and apply it to another machine. Nothing can get broken, if RouterOS CHR can’t “call home” you will simply lose ability to upgrade RouterOS after 30 days. RouterOS will continue to work without any other limitations. You can give access to internet once you need to upgrade again.
I have a similar situation in my setup except that we have disabled connection tracking on all our virtual borders routers so we are unable to set nat locally or in upstream in order use Sergejs solution.
It is pointless to alter the routing table for all the traffic that is going through this CHR for obvious reasons already mentioned by Alfredo (source of ip address will still be from private space no meter what the routing decision is).
To complicate the topic more, I’m unable to thing further for other CHR that we have in a production environment where we use VRFs and were the management traffic ( which have access to the internet ) is bound to a VRF).
We have done a scheduler to alter the configuration in such a way that connection from CHR to license.mikrotik.com is possible but this is not elegant nor professional in such an environment.
Maybe you should reconsider adding a feature to set the outgoing interface ( or source address ) for traffic generated by the CHR itself. The same situation is faced for DNS queries locally generated and for NTP client queries.
For anyone else like me trying to figure this out, I was confused by normis’ comment until I realised that he is referring to upgrading the RouterOS version number, not upgrading the RouterOS licence level.
I believe this is only true if you have previously bought and installed a paid perpetual licence. If you’re running a trial licence then the router will revert to ‘free’ licence level and throughout will be severely restricted to only 1 Mbps