I have been using Mikrotik routers for a long time and am currently using two devices - a CCR-1009 connected to my primary ISP and a RB750Gr3 connected to my secondary ISP. This setup (while not perfect in terms of failover) has been fine since my ISP lines were all symmetric 1Gbps FTTH and in a homelab environment, I don’t have that much traffic.
However, time marches on and now my primary ISP has upgraded all connections to symmetric 3Gbps FTTH and my secondary ISP is offering symmetric 5Gbps FTTH for a few dollars more. I expect that in the next year or so, 5Gbps will become the standard and 10Gbps will be relatively inexpensive. This means that my current pair of routers is not going to be able to take advantage of the new speeds.
I am therefore looking for Mikrotik routers that:
Have more than 2 SFP+ ports - I have an existing CRS305 switch connected via SFP+ and would like to move to having both ISP connections to SFP+ ports (for future proofing) on one device for better failover
Preferably passively cooled
The options I’ve considered so far are:
RB5009UG+S+IN - probably comes the closest to meeting my needs. The only problem is that with only 1 SFP+ port, I do not have sufficient ports to take advantage of any future 5GBps/10Gbps FTTH connections
CCR2004-16G-2S+PC - Similar to the RB5009, once I use up the 2 SFP+ ports (1 today for my CRS305 and the other used for my 3Gbps FTTH connection), I’m left with only 1GBps ports to use with any future 5Gbps/10Gbps FTTH connections
CCR2004-1G-12S+2XS - The active cooling is a concern as I’m seeing reports that the fans start hitting 8000+ RPM if there are copper transceivers attached. This is a concern as I need to use copper transceivers to terminate the FTTH connections.
Is there some other router / combination of switch & router that I could be considering? Please do share your advice/recommendations!
Problems with multi-gig links are at least the following:
transmitting more than 1Gbps over UTP is power-ineffective and makes transcievers hot. This is a particularly big problem with SFP+ RJ45 modules because SFP modules don’t offer enough cooling. Which is then a problem when quiet operation is wanted/required. FO connections (or DAC on shorter connections) are thus preferred and hopefully we’ll see shift towards SFP+/FO connectiviry on other vendors’ equipment (in consumer segment) as well.
Newest RJ45 transcievers raise the bar of low-heat operations to 2.5Gbps, but for 10Gbps it’s still a big problem and is likely to remain for some time.
routing at those speeds either require very fast processors or offload to ASICs (L3HW offload) or use of inovative technologies (e.g. VPP/DPDK). In current Mikrotik product portfolio there are a few devices which offer L3HW offload, most are limited functionality-wise. The only devices, which can do multigig routing utilizing L3HW offload and offers capable processor to deal with traffic which can not be offloaded, are CCR2116-12G-4S+ and CCR2216-1G-12XS-2XQ.
MT does offer CHR which can make a pretty fast router if run on a pretty fast hardware … but that’s often not really quiet solution.
using multiple multi-gig links in a primary/secondary manner (or even load sharing / failover manner) is even more resource-demanding than using much faster single link due to complexity of running two links concurrently … and that complexity may mean that L3HW offload is not possible (at least not to the fullest)
While talking about L3HW offloaded devices: there are quite a few CRS3xx devices, which offer decent routing speed. But if firewalling is required as well, then number of feasible devices drops. Further more, to fully utilize HW offloading, only basic firewall functionality may be offered. The level of “allowed” functionality might be on par with some other vendor’s solutions and would be very competitive in those use cases, but according to what we’re used to with RouterOS it’s a sub-par solution. In some particular use case this may be enough though.