[AusNOG] RouterBoard

[Andrew Cox]

Having been a user, forum poster, consultant and blogger of RouterOS
related networking kit and updates for nearly 8 years now, I can confirm.

No, not everything that was expected made it into the v6 branch. Yes there
are still a number of services (even btest itself) that will run on a
single core. Yes there are still some bugs in areas that a border or core
router would require and at high traffic volumes I could not recommend
deploying a single unit and expecting everything to just work. I would even
agree entirely that the support process sometimes seems lackluster.

But. And I say this having gone through the trials of every major release,
the same as I know many others who have run into similar problems with the
big name brands as new major releases come along. But.. the platform the
CCR's are built on is solid. The hardware is built to perform a lot better
than it can at present and each new release improves upon this, even
looking at the differences between performance on older hardware (RB1100)
running v5 vs v6 shows just how far MikroTik have come and how far they can
still go. The TILERA chip is an amazing piece of tech being used in DPI
engines and the like already, and its only a matter of time before the same
utilisation will be realised on the CCR's.

Unfortunately as a private company MikroTik can an do run on their own
schedules and development priorities for their own reasons and until such
time as someone can convince them otherwise or buy them up I feel they're
going to use their rather unique position to continue surprising and
frustrating us in equal measure.

Would I use them? Yes, and I do myself all over the place.
Would I recommend them? Yes, but you MUST above all else do your due
diligence and measure what cost the maintenance and support is to you
versus the big boys and their support and maintenance agreements.

I hope this encourages some of those who've not tried MikroTik to at least
give it the time of day and see how it ticks, but also that it would
persuade others to leave it be for now and stick with what they know and
what works. RouterOS is a big world to jump into and there's so much that
they can do easily that you can't find elsewhere, but it can be a nightmare
if you aren't prepared to do the hard yards testing twice and deploying
once.

-Andrew Cox
On 10/03/2014 8:15 am, "Tom Berryman" <tom at connectivityit.com.au> wrote:

>  David is correct, the Tilera CPU with RouterOS does struggle with single
> threaded processes - worse than just BGP operating on a single core, all
> routing (OSPF, RIP and static) processing will happen on the same core.
> ROS7 is likely to change this (rumours).
>
> But still, the CCR range has forced a lot of people to change how they
> think about routing (at a relatively small scale) - and has certainly
> bought the cost down. "Routed" packets per dollar, I don't think anything
> in the new hardware market can compete.
>
> Vyatta has other challenges like x86 PCI architecture that will limit your
> total throughput - however things like processing BGP are drastically
> improved compared to ROS. Ubiquity has ported the Vyatta/VyOS to MIPS
> processors, possibly worth a look but I don't think it has any SFP+.
>
> Given Alex's application - storage - a layer 3 solution is not likely to
> be the best.
>
> Alex, have you considered something like the Brocade VDX Ethernet fabric
> (VDX could enable 40g native interfaces)? Or at least other layer 2
> solutions? I noticed that you have tried routing on switches (Dell) perhaps
> something with some more power with this design would yield better results
> for you?
>
> Tom
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* AusNOG [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] *On Behalf Of *David
> Bomba
> *Sent:* Monday, 10 March 2014 12:32 PM
> *To:* Damian Guppy
> *Cc:* ausnog at lists.ausnog.net
> *Subject:* Re: [AusNOG] RouterBoard
>
>
>
> I believe he has the CCR1036-8G-2S+ which has 2x10GB SFP+ ports.
>
> I think the issue he is hitting is the single threaded nature of routerOS
> for a lot of its functionality.
>
> BGP, for instance spins on a single core. Until ROS becomes multi-core
> aware/capable a lot of its functionality will be capped at the per core
> performance.
>
>
>
> On 10 March 2014 12:26, Damian Guppy <the.damo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  CCR1036 has no 10G ports, only 1G, so im not sure why you would expect
> to get a single TCP stream past 1G (even with LACP since that is not how
> LACP works)
>
>
>
> --Damian
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 6:58 AM, Alex Samad - Yieldbroker <
> Alex.Samad at yieldbroker.com> wrote:
>
> Hi
>
>
> So I have tested routerOS ... in VM and also bought the ccr1036.
>
> I'm not 100% happy with the ccr1036.  Basically can't push 1 tcp stream
> past 1Gb/s I can get 8-9Gb/s with multiple streams. I can get UDP up to
> 9.8Gb/s
>
> I like routerOS interface (have to admit I like the vyatta better from
> what I saw).
>
> But now I need to find something similar to these devices around the same
> price and around the same performance, I would like to push it all to a VM
> but Brocade want my 1st and 2nd child ...
>
> So routerOS support is nowhere close to Cisco and rightly so for the
> price, so I have some hesitancy in rolling these things out, especially if
> they are going into the core.
>
> So are there any suggestions from the list ?
>
> Alex
>
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