I am getting ready to Colocate with a data center. The main purpose of this is to route the /24 of addresses from them back to my small(ish) wisp.
The route will see a constant l2tp vpn connection and will pass at a max 50mbps (its less now but planning ahead). The router be passing 50mbps full duplex as traffic coming into the data center will immediately be sent back out over my vpn and then to my customers. For now that’s all its going to do, but might do QOS eventually. Can anyone recommend a routerboard for this? I don’t think it will take too much horsepower, but then again maybe it will
I was just thinking a RB450G in a rackmount case. I do have a rb1100 laying around, would that be better suited for this? It doesn’t need that many ports!
That’s what I’m thinking too. I do have a use for it coming up that’s why I was asking if I could get away with something like the 450g. I hope I can get my hands on another one when I need it!
Alternatively if you want more power (and the ability to run virtual machines on your mikrotik) you could look at going for an x86 based router instead of a Routerboard.
We use a lot of Routerboard gear, but normally only to back-up the higher powered x86 boxes we use.
These include:
PowerRouters
Dell servers
IBM servers
HP servers
PC-Engines boards
etc etc
Interesting option. They are giving me 4U of space and I was thinking of tossing a Server of some sort in there anyway. How reliable is it to have router/webservers etc on one box. What software do you use to run Virtual Machines? VMWare?
a) Run ESXi with mikrotik running as a Virtual Machine
b) Run Mikrotik as the host and use KVM to run virtual machines (note KVM is only in v5 at the moment, however we’ve had it running on our test bench for quite some time without any major issues)
It’s up to you as to what you’re familiar with / happy to support.
KVM still has ram limitations on Mikrotik at this point in time (2GB) and the ESXi method has been proven so that’d probably be the best option.
