Mikrotik Cloud Core Router and BGP real life experiences?

Fri Dec 27 15:31:37 UTC 2013

FYI... Mikrotik Cloud Core routers are nice, however one has to keep something in mind when deploying them...

Only One Core (of the CPU) is dedicated to each port / process.
So this is good so as  to contain what happens on a single port from taxing the whole CPU..
But not so good when you need more cpu power than a single core for that port.

Also, BGP process will only use one core.

While these units make for great 'customer facing' edge routers, with plenty of power and the ability to keep issues contained... The X-86 based (Core2Duo/i5/i7) Mikrotik are more suitable (Processing power wise) for running multiple full BGP tables peering.

Regards & Good Luck.

Faisal Imtiaz
Snappy Internet & Telecom

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Geraint Jones" <geraint at koding.com>
> To: "Martin Hotze" <m.hotze at hotze.com>
> Cc: nanog at nanog.org
> Sent: Friday, December 27, 2013 4:02:45 AM
> Subject: Re: Mikrotik Cloud Core Router and BGP real life experiences?
> 
> I am going to be deploying 4 as edge routers in the next few weeks, each will
> have 1 or 2 full tables plus partial IX tables. So I should have some
> empirical info soon.
> 
> They will be doing eBGP to upstreams and iBGP/OSPF internally. I went with
> the 16gb RAM models.
> 
> However these boxes are basically Linux running on top of tilera CPUs, in
> terms of throughput as long as everything stays on the fastpath they have no
> issues doing wire speed on all ports, however the moment you add a firewall
> rule or the like they drop to 1.5gbps.
> 
> 
> 
> > On 27/12/2013, at 9:47 pm, Martin Hotze <m.hotze at hotze.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > looking at the specs of Mikrotik Cloud Core Routers it seems to be to good
> > to be true [1] having so much bang for the bucks. So virtually all smaller
> > ISPs would drop their CISCO gear for Mikrotik Routerboards.
> > 
> > We are using a handful of Mikrotik boxes, but on a much lower network level
> > (splitting networks; low end router behind ADSL modem, ...). We're happy
> > with them.
> > 
> > So I am asking for real life experience and not lab values with Mikrotik
> > Cloud Core Routers and BGP. How good can they handle full tables and a
> > bunch of peering sessions? How good does the box react when adding filters
> > (during attacks)? Reloading the table? etc. etc.
> > 
> > I am looking for _real_ _life_ values compared to a CISCO NPE-G2. Please
> > tell me/us from your first hand experience.
> > 
> > Thanks!
> > 
> > greetings, Martin
> > 
> > [1] If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> 