Is there a guide on how to size the VM for CHR?

RouterOS Virtualization
1

is there any guidance on how to size / spec a VM for CHR use?

i will want to deploy a vm for public wifi and use a captive portal for acceptable use policy. for 2000users with about 1.5gbs load-balanced wan.
but other than how much ram to use for the NAT table. there is not much available information on how many cores. or the speed of the cores that is required.
i use to run a CCR1036, but the device is acting up. and if anything goes wrong i am too far to get parts or replacements in acceptable speed. its better to transition to CHR
can anyone direct me where i could find such info?
or how it can be calculated?

2

You could take a look at bundles made by others to get a sense of what you might need. Here is one from r0c-n0c for example.

3

Well done, nice hint!

4

thank you for the help. i didnt know anyone sold devices intended for for x86 ROS.
interesting, looks like they went with high clock speed and not cores. i will stick to 3.2ghz minimum speed, maybe a 4 or more cores.

thanks again. i was thinking in the wrong direction.

5

A lot of network code is single-core in Linux itself. Most of the protocols were designed in times where multicore was the last thing anyone was worried about :wink:
Even something which is theoretically multithread-friendly like BGP it took a lot of time to actually make it utilize many cores efficiently. You can see the trend of high clock - few cores in most of the manufacturer’s offering. MT had a device with IIRC 72 cores once but the majority of new ones are like ARM quad with clock ~1.2-1.7Ghz.

6

i have a Dell R230 with a 4core/8threads 3.6ghz (8m cache)
if i add sfp+ nic, can i reuse that?
or do i need more cores and cpu cache?

should i split the job to 2 devices? so 1 Nat router and 1 captive firewall?