Is it smart to “place” a gateway Mikrotik (around 200 users, mostly wifi, alltogether 50Mbps peek) as a virtual device in ESXi server? I did some test; with several queues, filter rules and few mangles, and around 160Mbps traffic CPU(s) go up to 50-60% …
Does anyone have some more experience with this?!?
If this is a bad idea, what do you suggest I should migrate to: rb1200 or rb1100AH (both are more than enough for my needs) - it works fine with 450G for now (at under 40% cpu)…
I have deployed Mikrotik+SQUID+Radius Server in one box at various cable.network and so far I am pleased with the results. If you use some modern hardware with dual processors with multiple cores , gigabit connectivity, and with raid supported storage, you will be fine for virtualizing multiple OS in one box. For example most common systems I have used are IBM xseries with dual processors with 4/8 cores p/p.
Last virtualization I have done was on Intel base server board with single quad core processor with 16 GB RAM and dedicated each hdd for each OS and it worked fine.
We have about 10 ROS VMs running on ESXi 5.0 on multiple servers in multiple places around our network. Each terminates all of a single customer’s VLANs. IPv4 and IPv6, OSPF and firewall. Passing about 10-20mbit with spikes up to 100mbit. Our main proxy is also a ROS VM, with a 160gb SSD passed to the VM.
Havent had any problems yet, they are all currently at 200+ days uptime.
However, we still keep our edge router and ACs on RouterBoards (using 1100AH and 1100AHx2)
Thanks for the prompt answer.
We have several linux servers (email, web hosting, dns, backup database and radius, …) at one ESXi 4.1 server working perfectly; also, one Windows XP, for accessing the inner network… Everything works great, but I was not sure how would a RouterOS installation behave in such “mess” 
thanks again!!!
10x!!
It’s nice to know that configurations like these work great. I’ll start looking for new hardware since our current ESXi machine is some old(er) 4core AMD …