I have recently been introduced to Mikrotik and the RouterOS and I AM STARTING TO FALL IN LOVE. Been testing CHR in a virtualized environment (VMware ESXi) which has been going pretty well. Now I’d like to expand that environment a bit, and I noticed that I had some old hardware hanging around that I’d previously installed OPNsense on, and I’d like to install RouterOS to it. Hardware is a Protectli Vault 6-Port, is this possible?
I looked on the Mikrotik download site and couldn’t find an ISO that I could use to create a bootable USB Flashdrive. I suspect that there is a different way to do this that I have yet to figured out. If this is possible and someone has figured it out, please do share. If the answer is that I should just suck-it-up and buy one of the routers from Mikrotik, please say so as well.
Wow, I’m surprised that nobody has responded to my post. Does this mean that nobody on here has ever attempted what I’m trying to do? I find that strange…no?
x86 (and x86-64) breed of ROS v6 is pretty outdated when it comes to available drivers and can thus be very picky about hardware it successfully runs on. So it seems that most often professionals use CHR breed. This does cause some performance loss, but that can be offset by selection of faster hardware (which wouldn’t be supported directly).
So yes, it is quite possible nobody tried ROS as bare-metal installation on hardware you mentioned.