x86 and 10G

RouterOS General
1

I’m looking at using a E3-1230 v3 xeon and a couple of x520 intel 10G cards for routing on some 10g networks.

Is any one using one of these, and if so, are you seeing routeros able to do >20g throughput, and if so is this with firewall rules ?

I’d like to do it on x86 as I want to have 4 10g ports,and a ccr1072 is out of the price!

2

if you need only 2 10g interfaces the cheaper choice is CCR1036-8G-2S+ 1100 US

every x540 card cost 300us

i suppose you need more than 2 10g interfaces

4 cards = 1200US only on cards

CPU 300 us

another components easily 300US or more

total 1800US or more

if you need 40 gigabit throughput ccr1072 is a very cheap equipment

many professionals are waiting ccr1072 beacuse they prefer it to assemble a machine to emulate it

you have to assume all responsibility for support and hardware compatibility issues (x540 do not appear in hardware compatibility list).

that machine will use more space and power than ccr1072

some times money buy you some thing more than hardware

off course some users report a virtualized RouterOS as a solution but its more complex to implement

3

The Equipment cost isnt a problem as I already have the x520’s from a previous project and the other components are arround $600 for me to get. I need to have 4 10g interfaces so the 1072 is the only option for a ccr, but its obviously a huge ammout of money more than the 600 + license that i’d need to get going with my existing equipment

I just wnt to know about throughput figures and if anyone has had any success with >20gbit routing with some firewall rules on x86

4

You won’t be able.
From 15 years i do routing mostly with PC, including heavy loaded 10Gb links.
Last i deployed several 1230v2 with dual port intel 10G NICS - both under Linux and Router OS

Extremely optimized and specially compiled kernel with additional interrupt tweaks on xeon 1230 was going for 35%:
Port 0 Input 3.5Gbs, output 8Gb/s
Port 1 Input 8Gbs, output 3.5Gb/s
This is with kernel cut from everything - iptables, ebtables, etc pure routing

Performance on stock kernels are almost twice lower
Router OS performance is twice lower too.

For Router OS most likely will achieve success for over 20Gb, if:

  • use e5-1650 or higher CPU (warning, don’t use any models with QPI - it will actually perform slower) - expensive
  • use commodity equipment - Core i7-5820K clocked at 4Ghz, or if is still slow - Core i7-5960X clocked at 4Ghz - no xeon version will beat the latter on any circumstances

P.S.
I actually have tested pair of CCR1036 and left em on production environment - for pure routing they rocks

5

maybe a core i7 4790k with 4ghz core clock will be better than that xeon in terms of performance??