As soon as I found out about this switch, I had to have it. I knew a lot of things about MikroTik’s environment and love the home routers. However, as soon as I got my hands on it, I found out the switch only ran RouterOS, at the time. Now it has been a while and SwOS 2.13 has been released and I want to run it. However, I am running it in production as my primary switch.
Does anyone have a running MikroTik CRS354 running SwOS?
I do. I am running CRS354-48G-4S+2Q+ (the non-POE version) with SwOS 2.13.
Switching from RouterOS to SwOS doesn’t give you any advantage. Except much faster boot-up time after power outage.
In certain scenarios SwOS is much easier & faster to set up, like only a few VLANs, no fancy stuff. If you already have it running with RouterOS, I see no reason to switch to SwOS.
If you are using flow control, this can’t be enabled in SwOS.
Agreed. RouterOS gives you so much more, and with 7 you can run Layer 3 “switching” (routing in silicon instead of by CPU).
All of my RouterOS-capable switches run RouterOS for a consistent UI across all platforms, and since most of my CRS’s are the 300 series, I can use them as routers if I want with no performance penalty.
Just something to think about.
I have two Mikrotik switches. one is only SwOS the other is only RouterOS.
If your happy with RouterOS then stick with it. On the CRS3xx its not too bad but on the CRS1xx/CRS2xx RouterOS is a proper nightmare. SwOS is very simple but I had it working right away. RouterOS can be a real head scratcher for switches.
I wish Mikrotik made a more advanced SwOS instead of forcing RouterOS on us at times as its just so out of place
I would agree that if you are happy with ROS for your switch devices, there is little reason to change.
With that said, I do ALL switching functions in switches and currently have 6 SwitchOS only switches at my house (OK, I’m not normal) plus a CRS324 on a nearby mountaintop radio site that was shipped in error instead of a CSS324. That is also running SwitchOS. I am running (without counting) a little over 20 VLANs (again, I’m not normal).
I would definitely like to see SwitchOS modernized a bit, but in my opinion, it is easy to set up (far easier than RouterOS for switching), and it serves my purposes quite well.
Just finished configuring CRS354-48G-4S+2Q+.
It came with RuterOS boot, but I switched to RouterOS as I understand, if used as simple switch, that is better option.
First thing I noticed is that in SwOS mode, all three coolers are run on 100% speed all the time, even if device has nothing connected to it - thus no traffic. In RouterOS mode cooler do not turn on, even with some traffic.
Then I struggled to set trunk port.
I finally found out that as I have two VLANs with IDs 1 and 2, I had to change Default VLAN ID for trunk port not to be 1 (which is default). It has to be different from actual VLAN IDs passing through trunk port. I found about this by pure luck. I do not know if this is a bug or feature. I am noting it here in case someone else get into same problem, so he can find out in easy way.
If it is only a trunk port - only tagged traffic, then you are correct, the default VLAN ID should not be the same number as one of the actual VLANs. In my case for VLAN tagged only ports, I use 970 + port number as the default VLAN number - so port 1 is VLAN 971, port 2 is VLAN 972, etc. (note that I recently posted that I use 980 + port number in another post in error).
BTW, I highly recommend that you DO NOT use VLAN 1. Yes, it will work, but too many devices treat VLAN 1 different. In my case I use VLAN 100 for my cable based internet, and 101 - 106 for LANS that use the cable; and VLAN 200 for my fiber based internet, and 201 - 209 for LANs that use the fiber. Each VLAN has the VLAN number as the third octet of the IP addresses used on the LAN - so everything on VLAN 201 has 192.168.201.nnn addresses. Makes it easy for my brain to remember it…
It would be good to have this mentioned in documentation.
BTW, I highly recommend that you DO NOT use VLAN 1. Yes, it will work, but too many devices treat VLAN 1 different. In my case I use VLAN 100 for my cable based internet, and 101 - 106 for LANS that use the cable; and VLAN 200 for my fiber based internet, and 201 - 209 for LANs that use the fiber. Each VLAN has the VLAN number as the third octet of the IP addresses used on the LAN - so everything on VLAN 201 has 192.168.201.nnn addresses. Makes it easy for my brain to remember it…
I wish I knew it earlier.