Hi guys,
We have bought a 2U Dell Server with 4 Dual 10Gbps ports and we would like to install RouterOS or CHR on it in order to overcome the BGP limitations of our CCR1036. We are not going to install anything else on this server to make sure it has all the power available to handle our multigigabit WAN connections. I would like to know if anyone know what should perform better the RouterOS 6.xx install directly (we don’t need Level6 license) on the server or the CHR over Xen?
Thanks,
Anyone?
no one? 
i think the problem installing routeros directly on x86 without virtualization is hardware compatibility
thats the main reason to virtualize routeros
technically speaking virtualization adds certain amount of latency but is in order of nanoseconds, nothing serious
as far as i have read at the forums x86 virtualized routeros implementations can be way to obtain the highest performance of routeros
For example x86 don’t have virtio drivers, so you can’t install RouterOS on a public cloud like Amazon EC2, Azure, or like it.
CHR includes virtio drivers, x86_64 support (i think), another license check…
CHR is for cloud, like tunneling between datacenters, etc..
Regards.
The installable x86 version does include virtio drivers, I use virtualised ROS instances at multiple places (on KVM, not Xen) with virtio, without problems.
Virtualisation is and will always be slower than running on bare metal, but it has many obvious benefits - the ability to hide host hardware differences and providing compatibility, portability are probably the most important ones. I suggest installing on bare metal, on your virtual environment of choice and test whatever workload you plan to hold it against. The kernel in recent ROS releases is fairly new, I think you have a good chance of being able to run it on bare metal.