I am very new to Mikrotik however this company has been on my radar for the last couple of years. At the moment we’re in need of an L3 switch (or fast router) that can handle a simple setup of a single IP /30 WAN link on one side and a /29 public network on the other side. I’ve never had an ISP force us into this position before. Usually they just hand you your /29 or whatever subnet you’re being given, reserve one IP for the gateway address and we’re off. But in this case I need a router that can handle at least one 10g fiber port for the WAN side and route the /29.
What I’ve found this far is that this unit:CRS312-4C+8XG-RM could possibly do the trick. However I have to do more research on it to see if I can address ports and route this traffic between these networks with this switch. Is this possible?
yes you can, but, it will be mandatory to use L3 hw offload which implies you have to do a bridge vlan filtering configuration style (also forget about using swos)
also be aware of current limitations of L3 hw offload
Thanks for the response. I’m not at all bothered by a command line interface. I usually run Cisco gear but this time I don’t want to pay the Cisco price.
I am new to Mikrotik and might be missing this L3 “limitation”.
And on those notes maybe I should just be looking at a regular router since something like this: CCR2004-1G-12S+2XS appears to be fast enough for what we need. Again all this is doing is static routing for those two subnets over a 10G link. Nothing fancy.
The normal reference for an approximate speed of Mikrotik devices (in normal routing operation) is the speed given for:
Routing 25 ip filter rules 512 bytes packet.
The CCR2004-1G-12S+2XS https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_1g_12s_2xs#fndtn-testresults
has 4854.3 Mbps for it.
If you check its block diagram: https://cdn.mikrotik.com/web-assets/product_files/CCR2004-1G-12Splus2XS_200459.png
you will see that it has not a “proper” switch chip, so LH3W on it is out of question, though - it depends on configuration - maybe you can use fastpath (essentially no firewall) and aim for the 23717.1 stated for that.
The CRS 312 instead is a switch with marginal routing capabiliities, but with a very fast switch chip that - if properly configured - can do LH3W and route at “near wire speed”. https://cdn.mikrotik.com/web-assets/product_files/CRS312-4Cplus8XG_190703.png
but - curiously enough - Mikrotik does not publish test results for L3HW routing for it. unlike what they do for (say) the CRS504: https://mikrotik.com/product/crs504_4xq_in#fndtn-testresults
so you should wait for someone with some experience using it with L3HW to have an idea of the speed it can reach.