Most larger enterprises either use VmWare or smaller ones as well as larger ones are moving to Hyper-V for the reason that they get all from one hand.
THere is a seroius need for router / firewall appliances, not only because people use clusters of virtulaization machines that must be protected. A special edition or special licensing could possibly pay for this - I know I would gladly pay 100 USD more for a Hyper-V package that integrates fully native.
I hav one of those cases here. I run a Mikrotik based fabric - a couple of Mikrotik hardware all around. Now I am adding an external system and the price of adding Mikrotik hardware there would not be even funny (payment is about 400 USD per rack unit height - no, this is not ācheap run the mill hostingā and it is not even the highest tier - in the highest offer there I would pay 1500 USD per rack unit). As I run a lot of Hyper-V (plus later a bare metal machine) I would really like just have a small RouterOS instance, especially as it does realtively little traffic (tying this into our fabric for control, some remote desktops, some internal dashboards, sql transfer traffic and maintenance - but not thousands of users, we talk of like 5 users maximum).
The abandonment of Xen has left RouterOS with KVM only, and that is not going to establish it as virtual routerā¦ which is market. SImply because no proepr company will decide their virtualization platform based on the requirements of a mere firewall, and will be reluctant to add another platform (the cost would be too high - in our case I would need a KVM specialist 24/6 and that will cost).
Readding support would open a significant market. Given that Mikrotik seems to move up from small devices only (i like the 36 core one - may get one myself for the cluster we build in the office) support for a virtualized environment may be another plus point.
RouterOS works fine as a regular x86 OS virtualized; I use it in xen. My understanding of their support for virtualization was to provide a special version that would work for paravirtualization, where the underlying CPU didnāt need to specifically support actual virtualization.
Well, it does not work curently well with Hyper-V and with VmWare.
Drivers for BOTH are part of the current regular kernel, so ādriversā is an excuse, not a real reason. The current kernel got the last Hyper-V driver into the kernel, so - it is all complete now (all otehr drivers+ vmware were in for some time).
I would be perfectly fine with the X86 version ONLY - or even for an additional cost - supporting both. Heck, you could easily double the cost and make me happy I mostly want one stack end to end, including places where installing a physical router is not properly possible. Because for example you pay 300 USD per hour remote hands and 850USD+ per server hosting and an installation per piece of 2500 USDā¦ (if anyone asks, I just go through a nice offer hereā¦ Aurora Center for example is 1750 USD insallation, 600 USD per unit colocation and 500 USD per hour remote hands and sadly without alternative if someone needs it
KVM, sadly- is not āenterpriseā In the ears of most people. The market is a little Hyper-V and a lot VmWare. Even XEN is not relevant so much outside the low cost / hosting side, it seems.
That makes you sound so super important. I bet you even have certifications and wear a tie? You canāt manage to do something you want with Microsoft software; there is nothing new under the sun.
The only problem with Microsoft is: why in the end they only implemented some crappy legacy 100Mbps network adapter? why not some e1000 like any virtualization platform do have? Because they want to addict to you to use only theirs software.
Hyper-V is good but not the best in performance/scalability/administration/cost. For simple setups like one or two machines it may work. But for larger - no thank you. I will not even consider use of Hyper-V.
Actually no, I stopped wearing a tie 20 years ago or so. These days I am in enough a position to not care about what tie-bearers or other people in general say. There is something really nice happening the moment you do not rely on other people to earn your living anymore - you simple stop caring about the anyway irrelevant 95% of the world.
Sanity, what exactly are you talking about?.. you just want to use RouterOS as virtual guests? whatās problem? I canāt speak about Hyper-V, but my ESXis have a few virtual routers inside it, one of the routers passing upto 500 Mbps of traffic between VLANs
KVM does not cut it.