CHR vs Virtualised VM ?

RouterOS Virtualization
1

Hello

At some site we are currently running virtualized RouterOS instances on ESX since 2-3 years, ie. before CHR was released.

Overall this works fine but i was wondering if there was a case in migrating towards CHR ?

Any insight / advice you might have would be most welcome.

2

CHR and the regular x86 version of RouterOS should be mostly identical. I can think of only the following differences:

  • They are licensed differently
  • CHR is 64-bit whereas RouterOS x86 is (officially) 32-bit only
  • CHR contains various VirtIO drivers. I’m not sure if regular RouterOS x86 contains them as well.
3

I believe this is the major advantage over x86 installations.
It allows for 10g networking in a virtualized environment.

https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:CHR

Usable Network and Disk interfaces on various hypervisors:

ESX:
Network: vmxnet3, E1000
Disk: IDE, VMware paravirtual SCSI, LSI Logic SAS, LSI Logic Parallel

Hyper-V:
Network: Network adapter, Legacy Network adapter
Disk: IDE, SCSI

Qemu/KVM:
Network: Virtio, E1000, vmxnet3 (optional)
Disk: IDE, Sata, Virtio

Xen Project:
Network: E1000, rtl8193, netfront
Disk: IDE, Sata

VirtualBox
Network: E1000, rtl8193
Disk: IDE, Sata, SCSI, SAS

4

Thanks

We unfortunately don’t run 10Gb yet so, as long as it works (which is the case so far), there would not be any significant advantage to move to CHR ?

5

If you don’t need more than 2GB of ram (x86 limitation) or more than 1gbit interfaces then I don’t see any good reason to migrate to CHR just yet.