We see that the CHR is getting quite popular, so we would like to ask everyone, what new features would you like to see in the future? List your top requests for Cloud Hosted Router (CHR) and virtual machines that we do not have yet.
You asked that a year ago as well: http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/chr-feature-requests/101125/1
What has been done with those suggestions?
How about a small web server? Only to host some warning/blocking/sponsor pages.
Small web server, if MikroTik would want to give us something like that, would also make sense for any other RouterOS, not just CHR. And it’s also true for pretty much anything else you can think of (any service and such).
CHR needs VM-specific stuff. VM tools being a nice example. Or all kinds of virtual drivers. And VMDK disks distributed as SCSI instead of IDE would also be nice.
CHR should run containers, docker or whatever.
Indeed. But that was all already suggested in the other thread that was started 1 year ago (and none of it realized).
+1 Docker is attractive, but other container options might be worth considering in future plans.
OpenVPN
Support for VMware Tools + Docker Support (Official Releases only) + Minimal Web Server
clarify please. why and how?
I’d love to see support for:
VXLAN
TRILL
Hyper-V Gen 2 VMs, especially with Secure Boot
Hyper-V 2016 Host Guardian System (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualization/guarded-fabric-shielded-vm/guarded-fabric-and-shielded-vms-top-node)
possibly even as a Hyper-V Switch Extension
Hi Normis,
Thank you for asking us.
My top suggestions would be:
- evpn and vxlan support
- Open Data Plane/DPDK accelerated forwarding
- New Kernel and “New Routing” aka v7
- ixgbevf and i40evf drivers
- virtio-net driver with multiqueue support
- Some form of dynamic VPN, or as the marketing folk like to call it SD-WAN
These features will improve performance of the CHR in both cloud and NFV scenarios, while adding features widely used in today’s “Cloud” that will drive adoption of RouterOS by both cloud providers (evpn/vxlan) and cloud users (SD-WAN).
Thats great
+1
Please clarify how you would use it and why 
Well, I´d like to use a CHR as Intrusion Prevention System to be placed at VMware´s vswitch, just like VMware´s NSX plus with IPS capabilities.
To run other webserver, mysql…
And please make CHR easy to install like other OS
I would like to be able to access the virtual BIOs UUID from within the guest CHR. With QEMU / KVM this is unique per VM.
In a linux guest it can be accessed using dmidecode.
I mentioned it in this thread- http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/get-uuid-from-inside-guest-chr/111011/1
There are two ways that a containerized approach could be used with RouterOS. I’ll use Docker as a viable/practical example:
(1) A new CHR variant could be added that would be a Docker container. For many people, this would probably be the easiest way to run a CHR variant, given the low overhead and easy setup of Docker containers. This would avoid the requirement to deploy and maintain a more robust (also higher overhead) virtualization system. Docker would also make it easy to mix CHR containers with other network tools, or even applications.
(2) RouterOS could also directly support the Docker Engine so that Docker containers (via images) could be supported directly on a RouterOS host system. This could be an alternative to KVM or Xen options. Personally, I find this option very appealing, since it would facilitate adding specialized modules to a RouterOS system, without incurring a lot of overhead or complexity in system management. This could also be a way for MikroTik to consolidate its virtualization options within RouterOS, and even support containers across different hardware platforms. Docker containers running on top of RouterOS could be web servers, file servers, syslog utilities, DNS servers (with specialized capabilities like DNScrypt), VPN concentrators (e.g., OpenVPN), or any of a variety of specialized network services, such as SmokePing or Nagios. It should even be feasible to run a RouterOS container, assuming (1) above. It seems that this could be a more rational approach to virtualization in RouterOS that could reduce MikroTik’s development and support burden for virtualization support.
I’d be interested in thoughts from others on this suggestion…
To that point, I’d like to add that if there’s a CHR (or really, any RouterOS variant) that can be deployed as a Docker container, this would also allow the use of RouterOS with Continuous Integration services like Travis-CI, thus enabling CI tests of 3rd party RouterOS tools, such as API clients, or simply the tests of universal scripts.
I wouldn’t mind having the Docker engine inside RouterOS though I would prefer to evolve the already implemented metarouter functionality.
Nested virtualization is supported by hypervisors and CPUs for a long time.
I highly doubt that Mikrotik will change CHR so that it works as a container. It sounds like a ton of work… Maybe I will be proven wrong. Eitherway I don’t like docker and containers in general so as long as it doesn’t affect the current feature set of RouterOS and CHR I wouldn’t mind it.