Hi guys!! We’ve worked with several CHR as eBGP routers, and those have a good performance, we also recommend to install an hypervisor because you can add any CHR that you require... however, while we wait for RouterOS 7 which may handle BGP in a multicore way, there are some extra awesome routers which are ESXi servers with an i7 processor at 4.2GHz per core which can load a Full Routing table (600k routes) in about seconds, if want to do this in another router it can take some minutes to los everything.
So the final question is if someone can use Mikrotik for a small ISP with 3 upstream providers with full BGP Feeds from them using x86 hardware. Do you recommend this ?
Well, I am fairly new to running BGP on a CHR , it does appear to work fairly well.
I am currently running BGP with full tables on my CHR 64-Bit system which is a virtual machine on a VmWare ESXi 6.5.0
My physical server is a SuperMicro with 128 Gig ram & two physical Intel Xeon 3 Ghz 10-core processors (hyper-threading disabled) (20 cores total) -and- 10-Gig network cards
I assigned my CHR BGP (64-bit) router 6-Gig of ram (more than needed) and 8 processors & vmnic3 10-Gig ethernet interfaces
My CHR is a license level: P unlimited
I would not recomend running BGP on a 32-Bit x86 ROS router. The x86 32-bit ROS does not support paravirtual vmnic3 ethernet interfaces and (for me) x86 32-Bit has been subject to hundreds of lockups when under heavy load, Also the x86 ROS 32-Bit version has limited useable maximum memory , vs the CHR 64-Bit version that can use greater than 2-Gig of ram memory. Lots and lots of ram memory is critical when running BGP.
FYI - on boot-up, my CHR appears to load the BGP tables (using 10-gig interfaces) in seconds (not minutes).
Although I am still new to BGP on a CHR 64-Bit system, I give it thumbs-UP
EDIT: Note - Currently , Mikrotik's ROS BGP is CPU-single-threaded (aka BGP only runs on 1 of possible CPUs) ((( At least that is what I think & have read))) --- Thus I suspect you want a very fast CPU processor core to run BGP.
- Note: Getting full BGP tables on a Mikrotik CCR1016-12S-1S+ with a 1-gig interface takes up to a minute (tilegx 1.2 GHz 16-core-CPU)
- Note: Getting full BGP tables on a Mikrotik CHR with a 10-Gig vmxnet interfaces takes only a few seconds (Intel Xeon 3 GHz 8-core-CPU w/ 25-Meg CPU cache)
North Idaho Tom Jones