I am looking into using Mikrotik CRS125-24G-1S-IN routers in place of brocade CES’s in certain locations to terminate MPLS from my headend(Brocade CES). I know that the brocades can do full line speed in their MPLS implementation.
I am looking to see what Mikrotik can do speed wise before I invest the time to figure out how to make it work(lack of simple LSP signaling is going to make this a real pain to interop with brocade). I am going to need at least 600mbps throughput on the Mikrotik to make this even worth considering.
You should consider the CCR line and not the CRS which is basically a switch with some light layer3 capabilities. Because it runs ROS, it has access to the full feature set, but many threads on here deal with people having performance issues because they’re asking too much of their CRS’s routing functionality.
That I couldn’t say since I’ve never put a CCR into any kind of core-level production.
I’d say that most of the line appears to be capable enough to handle 600Mbps without much problem, even with smaller packets such as RTP (VoIP).
with real internet flows using CCR for MPLS / VPLS backbone it is possible to use all ports at full rate
on a CCR1072 we can see one port at 1700Mbps with 92000 pps in and 140000 pps
we can see only one core with peak at 7% cpu
total trafic on the router is about 1700 Mbps in and out with about 250000 pps in and out
it is used as a core MPLS router
we are using CCR1016-12S-1S+ as edge for MPLS/VPLS
with 350 Mbps onf IPTV flow and 35000 pps we can see 3% total use of cpu with no more than 20% at max on a core
we will test as soon as available the new CRS 10G ports with MPLS HW in real life
stay tuned
a+
Thierry
strange to see that many are speaking about MPLS but none use it in production with high bandwidth
would be great to share real life using of Mikrotik MPLS/VPLS
Our core router (CCR1036) runs about 1200Mbps throughput with about 16-20% CPU usage. A little less than half of this is MPLS, the rest just standard IP routing. I could probably get 3Gbps if everything was MPLS, without all these firewall rules and connection tracking.
I would say from the MikroTik CCR line you can definitely get enough throughput to make this worth considering. The main consideration is your network architecture - the fewer firewall rules you live with, the better your performance will be.
The only negative with the cloud core (CCR) line is the possibility of maxing out a single core, since the units have a large number of relatively weak cores. You can run into issues/limitations with a relatively small CPU usage (ex. 10-15%) if a single core is hitting 100%, resulting in packet loss. This can be avoided by planning the configuration such that you do not need to tax the unit unduly with processes that are tied to a single core. Some configurations are more “multi-core friendly” than others.
In fact this is the point
Mixing MPLS and other services
My point of view is : one router for MPLS one router for firewalling
do not mix these type of services
Mikrotik is cheap and if you worry about space you get setup one on front and on the back of the rack
