CHR is a virtual appliance where MT can deliver a product to a plattform they know. They only have to deal with drivers from each hypervisor and hardware drivers are maintained by the hypervisor. This makes the support much much easier to handle as the number of scenarios for drivers is limited. So CHR is a packaged x86 64 bit ROS.
If you add hardware drivers to this as you would have for a bare metal it will become more complex to support in the end. This is my guess anyway.
What you want is x86 64 bit installation which is rather absent. I would however prefer a virtual environment CHR over bare metal every day due to operational advantages.
Re: They only have to deal with drivers from each hypervisor and hardware drivers are maintained by the hypervisor
The drivers missing in CHR for bare-metal are likely 100 percent the same exact drivers already built into x86 and they have been there since day one of x86. There is nothing to deal with when adding the drivers from x86 into CHR. The base "Linux" system is identical except for CHR is mostly built using a 64-bit compiler.
Re: If you add hardware drivers to this as you would have for a bare metal it will become more complex to support in the end
I disagree , the hardware drivers for bare-metal are already running good on x86
Re: … virtual environment CHR over bare metal every day due to operational advantages
For a smaller ISP , sure a CHR may fit in well - however - If you are running thousands (tens of thousands) of FW rules & BGP & OSPF & bandwidth management for many 10-Gig networks , then a physical bare-metal platform with 50+ Xeon CPU cores is necessary.
Check out the license costs for any hyper-visor (VMware ESXi or other) for a virtual platform that can assign 50+ CPUs to a guest hosted system. $$$$$$$$
Note - PfSense can do just about everything Mikrotik ROS can do - and also run on bare-metal with 100+ cores. However, I prefer Mikrotik when possible.
I just don't see a valid reason to hinder and limit CHR from performing at greater capacity loads with more throughput on bare-metal ????
North Idaho Tom Jones