Regarding NIC support (which includes 10Gbps NICs) there are 3 ROS variants:
- ROS v6 x86
Due to age of ROSv6 and underlying linux kernel it generally lacks support for newer devices. Which (sadly) includes most 10Gbps NICs apart from NIC based on early chipsets. Nothing much will change about support for modern NICs.
- CHR
As it's running in a VM actual hardware is dealt with by VM hypervisor and HW support is mostly not an issue (if VM hypervisor supports hardware, then ROS will make use of it. It comes with linux kernel of same vintage as ROS v6 but it doesn't cause similar problems.
Surely it comes with performance decrease due to virtualisation layer.
- ROS v7 (both x86 and x64)
Officially it's in public beta stage, however tests show that it is not very stable and lacks quite some functionaliry. It is, however, based on relatively recent linux kernel and it seems to use stock/vendor drivers (instead of proprietary MT drivers frequently used in ROS v6). Which means support for many modern peripherials. Also comes in 64-bit flavour which increases usable amount of RAM.
Hi sorry to bump in such an old thread.. but looking at the cheap prices of Dell PowerEdge Gen12/13/14 now.. we have some fairly decent XEON hardware dual cpu and quad cpu options in the market such as the R910, R820, R920, R830, R930 which can afford easy around 60 Cores / 120 threads depending on CPU version even 80Cores/160Threads.... so we got hold of one of the R920 and we decided to run RouterOS X86 and X64 v6 6.48.7 long term and v7 beta.. but out dual SFP+ 10g HP NC552SFP cards were not recognized on the ISO images from V6 or V7 routerOS.. so we tried Vmware install and on the VMWARE the NICs are recognized and they work ok on debian linux server versions... but when we install image of RouterOS back neither v6 or v7 recognized.. only the old INTEL RJ45 gigabit quadport NIC card is recognized.
So now we have found some cheap INTEL X520 DA2 cards online with intel82599es chip , would this be compatible with v6 and v7 direct ISO install image running on the server?