KVM, Hyper-V or Esxi

RouterOS Virtualization
1

I’ve been running a RB750Gr2 for some time now and am quite happy with it. I’ve acquired some hardware (I5-3350P and 16gb memory) and decided I want to use it for either a router (replacing the RB750Gr2), firewall or both. At this point, I think I want to try a setup like WAN->OPNsense (firewall)->DMZ->Mikrotik (router)->LAN. The OPNsense, DMZ & Mikrotik could go on a single hypervisor of this hardware. The current ISP bandwidth is 100/10 but may be bumped to 200/20. I’ve tried using a VPN, but outsiders starting hitting it and VPN isn’t altogether necessary so I switched to using ssh tunnels and am satisfied. May possibly use VPN’s again in the future. The load is not heavy, 15-20 users in a home environment of widely mixed OS’s and a lot of video streaming and 3 vlans.

Which hypervisor works best with Mikrotik? Provides the best performance? Stability? KVM, Hyper-V 2016 or Esxi 6.5
Could I use the config from my RB750Gr2? Even if I go to CHR?
Does Mikrotik scale well with multiple cores or is it best left to single core?

I am leaning toward Hyper-V outside of these concerns. KVM switching seems difficult to set up for a router. I would use the free version of ESXi and backups are difficult on it.

Sorry if this has been addressed before, I was unable answers in searching the forums.

2

Avoid KVM if possible ( http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/chr-on-ovh-vps-ssd/107670/1 ), better go to ESXI (I don’t have any experience in Hyper-V).
Small OT: you could try backup by this: http://www.vsquarebackup.com/#features :slight_smile:
If you’re using VLANs, remember to set promisc mode on virtuall eth.
You can try to move your existing config from RB750Gr2 to CHR by /export from terminal.

3

Thank you for your reply. After following your links and digging deeper in to the forums, Esxi appears to be the most promising for performance and stability for use with MT at the present time. I thought KVM would have been the best for MT tbh and I see MT does work on all the platforms. Once they get Vmware guest tools integrated or able to be installed so it can function much like virtio, it should be even better.

I appreciate the link to vsquare, I see that thinware can do the backups too.

I run the vlans on a cisco switch on the lan, so it is not necessary on the MT.

4

FWIW I have been using CHR on Xenserver 6.5 & 7 with no issues.

5

You will currently get the highest performance out of CHR on VMWare.

Mikrotik need to add multi-queue support to the virtio-net driver to give maximum performance on KVM, which requires a kernel update (aka RouterOS v7)

6

I am actively using several CHR’s in KVM (self hosted on linux and in the cloud, as well), and I use “virtio” based storage and network. It is of great use, so if you have the host(s), I would go with KVM.
Cloudsigma uses KVM as the base of their cloud system and CHR also can be used there.