Hey All,
I need some advice for buying a new home router for my new house. I have the whole house CAT-7 cabling and 2 x 10 GBit Switches providing 1GBit/2.5GBit/5/10GBit for two isolated networks. Both Smart Managed, VLAN support and some SFP+ ports that are unused, as I don’t have fiber lying in the house (should have done that, but too late already). So I would love to use them for connecting in the network cabinet to the router.
I get 1 GBit Fiber with a ONT as FTTH into the cellar right in the network cabinet. 1 Gbit currently is max what is offered as a home internet link.
I am now in search for a good, powerful router, which can grow with demands and
Requirements are mostly: NAT for two networks coming over separate ports to the internet link, being prepared to route also above 1 GBit fiber, DHCP, firewalling, maybe some inter VLAN routing, multiple VLANs.
I am currently very torn between two solutions:
RouterOS on a CCR2004-1G-12S+2XS vs. VyOS on a SuperMicro SuperServer with a 4 x 10 GBit Ethernet and a Xeon or Atom multi-core CPU.
Any advice on that? Can one in the meanwhile trust the CCR2004-1G-12S+2XS to be stable with NAT over 1 GBit link?
From the past I have some experience with JunOS, Cisco IOS, OpenWRT, various more constrained routers (FritzBoxes) and also bare Linux on IPChains and Netfilter. So every solution should be manageable.
What I’ve always asked myself instead is “what the heck is someone doing with 10G at home?”
It’s just an economic and electricity expense and that’s it…
Some people have jobs requiring them to download and upload large files or graphics/photographs. Aside from that, I myself wonder the same. I think it’s an issue of the way these things are marketed to the masses who are told that more bandwidth means better internet speed. Nevermind the fact that most websites or services available on the internet cannot send data at such high rates of data and latency is your biggest speed threat.
In fact, I specified for home stuff, like this user.
Even in Italy they advertise 10Gbps connections for the home, but apart from the speedtests for morons,
and bragging about how idiotic you are (because if you do not have 10G you are just one dummy user),
there isn’t the slightest practical purpose… (outside someone work ath home with video production)
do not stay half measures
I think you can consider CCR2116-12G-4S+ can be a better bet for performance, scalability and functionality, i know it can be a expensive product but it have the best price to performance ratio of all MikroTik product Line
The 2004 will be fine for 1Gbps with NAT for a home router, but it won’t switch at wirespeed. Everything will be bridged through the CPU.
On the bench, I got about 20Gbps bridged through the CPU and the CPU got up to 95%. So unless you’re planning to max out the 10G ports all the time, it’ll be fine for those few times when you want to copy something from one machine to another.
I get the feeling this was a kind of experiment on the part of MikroTik with the particular not-really-a-switch-chip they chose to use. Had they coupled that with the 16-core CPU used in the 2116/2216, that would have made a world of difference. In my testing, the CPU can barely route more than 3-5Gbps before maxing out, even with Fasttrack and other optimizations. I stopped using it production once I surpassed 2Gbps.
For me, it’s designed for SOHO “multi-gig” situations, like a bunch of 2.5Gbps AP’s and desktops or servers that occasionally need more than 1Gbps between each other, but not more than 10Gbps, and not more than a couple (2-5Gbps) out to the world.
There is a performance benefit to placing your “upstream” devices (servers or other sources of data) to the two SFP28 ports, and “downstream” clients (download-heavy devices) on the SFP+ ports.
i think CCR2004-1G-12S+2XS is a niche product designed to be a PoP simple router
people often misconcept this product when see that ammount of SFP+ interfaces plus 2 SPF28 interfaces, look at it like a golden product to obtain a fiber switch plus a router for a cheap
but it is neither of the two, much less both simultaneously
“there is no free lunch”
i think CCR2004-1G-12S+2XS as a PoP simple router in fast-path mode is designed at best to push a little more than 1gbps for each sfp+ interface and a little more than 10gbps agregate for uplink 25g interfaces, providing some redundance for uplink conectivity but only for around 10gbps of total traffic, maybe a little more but not more than that
anything beyond that 10-11gbps with a fast-path configuration and you will quickly go into troubble
or
if you use a configuration beyond a simple fast-path routing you can have trouble to even reach 1 gbit, in scenarios requiring CPU processing only competes with CCR1009, in that level is positioned the CCR2004 in terms of a scenario requiring CPU muscle
@Stefan10G, pick the SuperMicro for highest speed, especially if it’s equipped with 4x10G NICs and you already own it, or go for the CCR2004-1G-12S+2XS if you want “damn good” speed and something that works out of the box .
I would personally go for the SuperMicro because you can run both RouterOS or VyOS on it as bare metal or use virtual machines along with kubernetes and all sorts of exciting things. HOWEVER, be aware of the noise level and spending some money for the electricity. The noise level can be remedied by replacing the fans.
