Hello!
We are currently doing a survey to analyze if we should use Mikrotik Switches to interconnect our buildings on our site. Normally we would use industrial ethernet components for this purpose but they are expensive and very limited in functionality and we have very good experience with Mikrotik Routers at our external sites so with think about using Mikrotik CRS326-24G-2S+RM also on our site.
To archive a high availability setup we thought about installing 2 x CRS326-24G-2S+RM at each building with a redundant setup. The primary idea was to be able to alter the configuration of switches or to be able to update RouterOS without interrupting the traffic on site.
I prepared a simple test setup (internal network, no firewall rules) to get familiar with MSTP. The test setup is shown below. Actually I mixed all sorts of Mikrotik Routers since all other Mikrotik hardware is in production use.
switch111.rsc (4.04 KB)
The configuration of all the switches is attached to this post. I followed the Mikrotik Spanning Tree Manual to setup MSTP and it seems to work as expected. From the PC I did a ping to some server on the Uplink.
I can restart each of the intermediate routers (111 or 113) and the connection to the Uplink will stop working for about 2 seconds and then recover again using the alternative link. Unfortunately, the connection stops again 3 times if the restarted router comes back online and takes the longest up to 30 seconds to recover again, so adding hardware to the setup breaks the connection longer than removing hardware.
Even when the router in the backup path not forwarding traffic is restarted, the primary connection is temporarily interrupted.
The only RSTP/MSTP aware Hardware in our setup is and will be Mikrotik Hardware.
In case of a hardware or a link failure 2 seconds for the recovery would be ok for our application even so faster would be better. More important would be to be able to do planned maintenance (reboot of switches) without connection loss, if possible.
My question is, if there are possibilities to optimize the setup or if there is a best practice setup for our application. Maybe MSTP is not the right approach to accomplish high availability and there is another preferable approach when using Mikrotik Hardware.
I hoped I posted the question at the right place.
Thanks for your suggestions in advance.
switch112.rsc (4.41 KB)
switch113.rsc (2.94 KB)
switch114.rsc (2.15 KB)
