Queues and 500MBit async connection

RouterOS General
1

Good Day All,

I have an older Dell server of the following spec:

2GB RAM
2 x Dual Core 1.6GHz Xeon Processors

I am currently running RouterOS 5.4 on a flash drive, but would like to get this installed to a physical drive. Only issue is that it is a SAS drive, so I can’t just hook it up to another machine and install it. I tried booting off of it and installing to the physical drive, but it never gave me the option to do so…anyway this is not what I am asking about right now…

Basically, we have a 500Mbit asynchronous internet connection coming in to our campus, all our student dorms are connected via fiber to our headquarters, our alumni housing, staff housing etc, so as you can imagine a lot of users and ongoing traffic.

My question is this, before we had a BlueCoat packet shaper to do all of our bandwidth limiting when we had a 100Mbit connection, a few months ago we upgraded to the 500Mbit but the packet shaper wasn’t capable of ‘shaping’ or limiting on that much bandwidth. Can I use RouterOS with this machine to take care of my bandwidth limiting / bursting, and QoS? Will it handle it?

Doing a speed test on my machine right now I get about 400Mbit down and about 460Mbit up, during this test the CPU utilization only jumps to 13%. This is only with a very simple NAT rule to masquerade from my machines IP address for internet traffic. So no limiting or anything going on.

Does anybody have any thoughts on this? I would love to replace our packet shaper with a Mikrotik solution!

Thank you so much!

2

It isn’t clear what is acting as your firewall or whether you are looking to RouterOS to cover all the required tasks. How the various connections present is also relevant - e.g. are student dorm connections coming in on different VLANs from offices etc. .

3

We have a dedicated Juniper firewall as well as a Palo Alto device partly acting as a firewall as well as our URL / Content filter.

Our campus is broken up in to a bunch of VLANs, so single men and single women each on their own, our family housing on another, our admin buildings make up several VLAN’s depending on which building they are in etc. Our switches take care of all this and bring everybody back to one central location.

The goal I guess is to put the RouterOS machine right behind our firewall.

So all I need it to do is manage the queues and QoS. The main question is, can the hardware I have available operate sufficiently at managing the queues and QoS for 500Mbit?

Thanks!

4

The efficiency of the network drivers would be important. My hunch is that the old Dell could do some subset of what you want but isn’t the ideal platform. If you have to start buying decent multi-port network cards you may end up spending a chunk of what a dedicated rack-mounted device would cost.

5

Makes sense…I will do some testing and see if this is really a good choice or not…thanks for your input.