Mikrotik Cloud Core Router and BGP real life experiences?

Fri Dec 27 16:00:26 UTC 2013

Exactly what Faisal Said. The BGP process appears to be single threaded at 
the moment. So taking on full BGP tables can be a bit slow compared to a 
decent X86 box. But in terms of raw forwarding power they are pretty 
monstrous.

We replaced a few Maxxwave 6 port Atom's with the CCR. ~400Mb/s and ~40K 
pps aggregate across all ports. CPU load went from ~25% to ~0-2%. These are 
in a configuration where they have little or no firewall/nat/queue rules. 
And in most cases are running MPLS.

We've not had any issues with stability so far either (Knock on wood).

Nick Olsen
 Network Operations 
(855) FLSPEED  x106

----------------------------------------
From: "Faisal Imtiaz" <faisal at snappytelecom.net>
Sent: Friday, December 27, 2013 10:33 AM
To: "Geraint Jones" <geraint at koding.com>
Cc: nanog at nanog.org, "Martin Hotze" <m.hotze at hotze.com>
Subject: Re: Mikrotik Cloud Core Router and BGP real life experiences?

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.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> 