I work in a small ISP and have been using mikrotik routers (for client routers) for over a year and I am now in love with them. That been said, recently our boss had the idea of changing our old and lately not well working cisco catalyst 3750 switches by the extremely cheaper mikrotik crs switches, and let me with the analisis for the viability of the idea.
My question is, are the CRS switches (CRS226-24G-2S+RM to be more precise) reliable for this task? I make this question cause despite my love for mikrotik routers making some research in diffrenet forums and have seen many people saying mikrotik switches don´t work as well.
In our case the switches should do only layer 2 tasks, with strong emphasis on vlans (more than 700 vlans, trunk and access). Level 3 would only be for managment (access to the switch, snmp), and we don´t necesarily need STP. The traffic they would move will be between 1-2 Gbps, but coul rise up to 10Gpps in the near future. For this tasks the cisco switches were quite an exagerated thing from my point of view.
Sumarizing, the aspects that worry me are performance, reliability, compatibility with cisco (specialy sg300) and, since we work with radio links, possible electrical issues and resistence.
Thanks in advance, I hope I can help with future issues!
From your described usage, it sounds like the CRS would be a good fit. Of course, we’d all prefer a 48 port version, but if you’re OK cascading multiple 24 port units using the SFP+ ports, that should work well for you. I use the CRS226 as my core at home (multiple VLANs, VERY high usage). I do exactly as you want to do…mostly layer-2 and my CPU usage rarely goes above 5% on the CRS. I do all my inter-VLAN routing with a MikroTik router (soon to be redundant CCRs if the wife lets me upgrade). Depending on how many total ports you need, you can cascade the CRS’s like I said to get the port count you need, and then cap off either end using a 10 Gbps uplink to a pair of redundant routers running VRRP. Since you’re an ISP, I’d probably look at a CRS stack capped at either end with a CCR1036-8G-2S+. With those, you’d get 10 Gbps links from each router to the CRS stack, but you could also run a 10 Gbps link between the routers directly and implement STP on the bridges. This, combined with VRRP will give you added layers of redundancy if any of the SFP+ links fail.
Thanks for the advice! actually, I was wondering how to aboard the stacking issue, since as far as I have seen mikrotik switches can´t be stacked as cisco. My idea was to cascade them using sfp ports as you said, and then using ccr routers for VRRP, routing and other layer 3 functions (glad to see I was not the only one around that idea).
Still concerned about reliability and the electrical issues I pointed before. Something like MTBF or personal experience of someone using them for long time would relieve me.