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tangent
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Holes at the low end of the CRS product line

Thu Jul 01, 2021 5:11 pm

I just spent several days selecting a 10G core switch for a small home LAN and ended up settling on the CRS328-24P-4S+RM even though it's ridiculously over-specified for my purposes. I'm writing this in the hopes that it guides Mikrotik to fill a few holes I see in the product line, which would have saved me a lot of angst in making this selection.

My key criteria are:

  • two 10GigE or two SFP+ ports at absolute minimum, and four to give me the warm fuzzies
  • two PoE out ports capable of supporting a modern 4K security camera
  • a few more plain GigE ports; PoE not needed for these
  • several features in RouterOS

It's that last requirement that has me bugging you all rather than the likes of TP-Link, Aruba, etc. I'm somewhat ambivalent about doing Internet routing with this device, but I do need other RouterOS features even without considering that. I still work from home since COVID-19 isn't "over" here yet, so even here in my home office over this past year, I've had cause to be familiar with things like PIM-SM, VPNs, and 802.1x, which reasonably do not have any place in a SwitchOS level product. One of the reasons I'm getting this switch is to play with such things directly so I can advise my customers from experience rather than read my customer's L3 switch manuals to them. :)

The CRS112-8P-4S-IN would be just about perfect for my purposes if only it had SFP+ instead of SFP.

The SFP+ ports might need more CPU grunt than its 400 MHz MIPS CPU can provide, and I'd like a bit more than that on the GigE side as well in case I decide to make this switch take over from my current Internet border router. Creating a variant of the CRS309 might be a better idea for this reason. My ideal might be called a "CRS308-4P-4S+IN". Add another unpowered GigE port to keep it in the "309" line, if you like. It'd make those that like to have such a port for out-of-band management happy.

It’s the PoE requirement that kept tripping me up. If it wasn't for that, the CRS309-1G-8S+IN would have worked by simply adding several cheap 1000Base-T SFP modules, but I couldn't find any that had 802.3af PoE output. I assume this is because SFP doesn't allow the module to draw enough power for that.

For a time, I considered strapping a RB260GSP to a CRS305, but I rejected that since I didn't want to do without RouterOS on one half of the device. It also offended my engineering nature to burn 2 ports just to get the combined feature set I wanted.

Another option I considered was the netPower 16P even though it'll be used indoors. I could've lived with the pointlessly bulky case and the need to buy a separate power supply for it, but having only 2 SFP+ ports was the last straw for me. If there were an indoor configuration — call it the "CRS318-16P-2S+IN" — I might've decided on it over the CRS328.

All of this brings me to what I've got coming on the UPS truck this afternoon, that CRS328-24P-4S+RM. I'm paying for about 20 GigE PoE ports I will never use, an over-specified power supply for all of those ports, and an oversized case to house it all. I would have been much happier with this proposed "CRS308-4P-4S+IN".

In case you're wondering, the hole I want MikroTik to fill is a small but expected to be growing section of the home LAN market.

PoE is really nice for security cameras, but 24 ports is just plain silly for most homes. Something in the 2-8 range should cover a huge chunk of the home market.

10G links have several good uses in the home today:

  • 10GigE copper links are appearing on high-end consumer equipment like high-end iMacs, NAS boxes, and Internet modems
  • 10G fiber is good for backbone links to other rooms with their own fan-out Ethernet switches: even if everything's GigE or slower in those rooms, they could combine to swamp a gigabit link back to the core switch
Last edited by tangent on Sun Jul 11, 2021 3:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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Re: Holes at the low end of the CSR product line

Fri Jul 02, 2021 1:01 am

I hear you too.
 
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Re: Holes at the low end of the CSR product line

Fri Jul 02, 2021 2:17 am

Better, but now take another 8-12 of those GigE ports away, downsize the PSU to suit, and put it in one of the half-width 1U cases, and we're set.

Oh, and while I'm dreaming, can we get it to be passively-cooled now that the PSU is smaller?
 
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Re: Holes at the low end of the CSR product line

Fri Jul 02, 2021 3:02 am

There's unlimited number of port configurations. You'll almost always never get the exact port config you need - but why would you ? what about growth? What if your 2 camera system turns into 4? Or VoIP phones wanting PoE?

You have a minimum requirement - and you should look at a future minimum requirement, then buy the closest 'but over' option of that. (need 18 ports? buy 24 port!)

Saying 'I need 16 ports, 2 of which are PoE, but 4x SFP+, but one of those combo, and another QSFP+' - the only way to get this kind of customisability is modular switches. Which cost more to get into anyway.
 
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Re: Holes at the low end of the CSR product line

Fri Jul 02, 2021 6:55 am

You'll almost always never get the exact port config you need - but why would you ? what about growth? What if your 2 camera system turns into 4? Or VoIP phones wanting PoE?

Then I'll still have 18 unused ports and a huge power supply sitting mostly idle behind them.

There's no single offering in MikroTik's line below 28 ports for this sort configuration. Even an 8-port device (4+4) offers more expandability than I can reasonably predict for the lifetime of the switch.

Why shouldn't the CRS112-8P-4S-IN be upgraded for SFP+ now that the cost delta for SFP+ has dropped so far?
 
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Re: Holes at the low end of the CSR product line

Fri Jul 02, 2021 4:19 pm

Why shouldn't the CRS112-8P-4S-IN be upgraded for SFP+ now that the cost delta for SFP+ has dropped so far?

Agreed. The CRS112 is a funny thing with its 8 ethernet, yet 4 SFP? A tiny switch yet you need two power supplies to make it work for all PoE needs. It is an ungainly thing. The CRS326 is what needs to to have 4 SFP! What were are asking here is a smaller CRS238, and I don't think that is an unreasonable configuration.
 
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Re: Holes at the low end of the CSR product line

Fri Jul 02, 2021 9:28 pm

Well. Mikrotik often have some odd feature-sets and port combinations. I don't think they do any detailed market research of model demand, instead they look in their toolbox and see what they can make with the available chips and components. I don't think that CRS112-8P-4S is strange, it's a very nice little PoE-switch with (limited) routing capability, and you can feed it with whatever voltage of choice.

Combining 10G/40G and 1G in the same box will drive up power consumption and heat on to the level of the highest rate interface, and will require larger buffers on all interfaces. The "8P-4S+" combination doesn't make sense in any Home or small Enterprise scenario that I can think of.
 
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Re: Holes at the low end of the CSR product line

Sat Jul 03, 2021 4:07 am

The "8P-4S+" combination doesn't make sense in any Home...scenario that I can think of.
It has a place in my home, at least. :)

Here's the scenario, which I think is fairly common: I have three rooms with high enough concentrations of Internet-consuming equipment that it's worth hard-wiring them: the office, the master bedroom, and the entertainment room. Each has at least 4 such devices, so I don't want to run 4+ wires back to a big central switch from each room, and I don't want to run everything over WiFi.

I solve this in part by putting small 8-port switches in the "leaf" rooms so I can run just one cable to those rooms. Currently, I do that with GigE, but I'm replacing that with 10G fiber. This effectively gives each of the remaining downstream switch ports their own gigabit link back to the core switch. Any single one of them can soak up the whole pipe and still leave space for the others. This is where two of my SFP+ ports go.

If I could only have 2 SFP+ ports, though, I'd have continued with GigE links for those leaf rooms, because the real reason I was looking at 10G was so I could move the direct-attached storage on my main desktop computer to a NAS. Gigabit just isn't fast enough for that. I'm even a bit worried that 10G won't be enough to competently replace the current Thunderbolt link.

And there we are, 4 SFP+ ports in a small home. If you have a bigger home with more concentrated nodules of tech, then maybe you need 8 or more SFP+, and you may still need a small group of GigE ports beside it, so 8+8 or 12+8 might also make sense.

Why the remaining few GigE ports? I covered that in the original post: the security cameras that happen to be closest to the core switch, plus the ancillary devices in my home office other than the main desktop and its NAS.
 
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Re: Holes at the low end of the CSR product line

Sat Jul 03, 2021 7:25 pm

Part of a nine building fiber rollout. Need switches with at least three SFP+ ports on them, PoE for 12'ish devices and short depth. Not unreasonable. The CRS328 is just total overkill.
 
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Re: Holes at the low end of the CSR product line

Sun Jul 04, 2021 2:25 pm

Sure, I can understand if your building a "loop of switches" and want to have a higher backbone bandwidth of the loop.

But if your having a star network and as few as 8 devices/clients/customers in a switch they will probably never ever require 10G uplink bandwidth at any moment. If you need to shuffle large volumes of data then you probably want to big a dedicated 10G network/backbone.

But there is certianly devices that I wish Mikrotik had in their product line.
 
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Re: Holes at the low end of the CSR product line

Sun Jul 04, 2021 3:22 pm

I just need a simple, cheap CRS with 8-10 1G ethernet ports and only ONE SFP+ port.

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