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Router

What is the difference in a core router and an access router?

Comments

  • WSSWSS Member

    One sits in a rack. The other has the building built around it.

    Thanked by 2Yura DigitalFyre
  • @WSS said:
    One sits in a rack. The other has the building built around it.

    Yes I figured that out I'm looking for something that will support about 50 vlans a 30g network uplink and about 20-30 cross connects to multiple providers the Mx104 is out of my price range looking for something a bit cheaper than $13,000 something inside the $2-4,000.

  • WSSWSS Member

    One that "fell off the truck", perhaps?

    Thanked by 2vimalware Makenai
  • I figured it out ASR 1002-X

  • InfinityInfinity Member, Host Rep

    @KeKe said:
    I figured it out ASR 1002-X

    For $4000? Where?

  • @KeKe said:
    Yes I figured that out I'm looking for something that will support about 50 vlans a 30g network uplink and about 20-30 cross connects to multiple providers the Mx104 is out of my price range looking for something a bit cheaper than $13,000 something inside the $2-4,000.

    Cloudrouter (Mikrotik) CCR1072-1G-8S+. Should be about 3.2k$ incl 3 * 10GB SFP+ transceivers.

    Thanked by 1ScammerProut
  • qpsqps Member, Host Rep

    You might be able to do this with a Brocade NetIron MLX-4.

    Thanked by 1Clouvider
  • ClouviderClouvider Member, Patron Provider

    Mikrotik? Meh

    Thanked by 1jh_aurologic
  • @Clouvider said:
    Mikrotik? Meh

    I looked at that and just said no.

    The core I'm going to do 2xASR 1002-X, distribution ex4550

  • At a certain point in this odyssey you will have to actually know what you're doing.

    Thanked by 3Yura doughmanes Makenai
  • bsdguybsdguy Member
    edited March 2017

    Sure, some Juniper box would be nicer. But there was that cost bracket, right.
    I've seen routerboards in quite a lot of places, incl. ISPs and usually they performed well and reliable.

    Would I myself like to use a routerboard? Nope. But I need not, I know where to find a really high-end board and engine (nope, not x86 crap) and I know how to find and build the adequate software stack.
    But Keke didn't ask for that. He asked for (what I took as) a semiprofessional setting at a rather low price range.

    Leaving aside ebay 2nd hand lottery Mikrotik looked like a good and, frankly a simple solution. that routeros thingy works well (if unnerving) and is said to be simple enough.

    That said, let me know better alternatives in that price range (or proper and well founded criticism re. Mikrotik). I'm interested, seriously.

  • ClouviderClouvider Member, Patron Provider
    edited March 2017

    @bsdguy not going into much detail, we have a Customer who liked them so much he put them in a colo with us for their private cloud setup. Mikrotik Cloud Router used to crash before RTBH kicked in on a high pps /relatively small volume (to what Mikrotik says this box supports) attack passing through it. Don't remember exactly whether it was just dropping BGP or requiring reboot to get back to life, either way the box wasn't responsive while under above attack scenario, the Customer decided to swap his full table to default only, and thrown some 2x EX4200 with AFL instead what solved the problem immediately.

    The OP however wants to have 3x full table. I'd personally throw an MX104 at least there, but I understand the budget constrains with that in mind I always prefer to have a solid, stable foundations to build on. In a hosting business your network is your foundation, no matter how excellent service you'll provide, when your network fails you, your service will never be as reliable as your customers expect it to be. If you can't afford to build a stable network from day 1, perhaps it would be a better idea to let the DC handle the routing for you, or pick a solid, well peered Tier-2 who will export a default to you and just have solid switches with L3 features, perhaps with BGP, with a long term view of a solid router on the roadmap when you start monetising the kit.

    Disclaimer: Customer is happy for me to disclose the above.

  • bsdguybsdguy Member
    edited March 2017

    @Clouvider

    I fully agree re. the necessity of a rock solid and adequate network for a provider.

    That said, I happen to know a provider here at LET - and by no means a bad or lousy one - who actually had a Mikrotik at his edge (and core, being the same for smaller providers).

    As for your customer: Careful, that can have many reasons and "Mikrotik is lousy" is just one candidate. But from what I know you may be right insofar as some Mikrotiks seem to have problems with large tables (of any kind; routing, firewall, no matter).

    The model I suggested has plenty Tilera cores which I consider OK for that purpose as well as plenty (and extendible) RAM.

    My personal take is that Mikrotik can be a pain insofar as you have to know a lot and to choose carefully as quite similar models can actually be seriously different (inkl. having an entirely different processor and architecture).

    For quite a while they bet big on a Power based architecture but I guess the price/performance ratio has become unattractive for them and I saw some routers of Mikrotik where I thought "guys, that's not going to hold up under full load" mainly because memory was too tight and the processor model not powerful enough. Funnily at the same time they also sold mid range models that were ridiculously overpowered. Probably a case of production streamlining.

    Whatever, for the given cost bracket OP will end up with a compromise or with a lottery game anyway.

  • dragon2611dragon2611 Member
    edited March 2017

    From what i've seen on the Mikrotik forums, the CCR's can sling a fair number of packets about for such a cheap box, but Full table BGP isn't one of it's strong points because the BGP process doesn't multithread and the individual cores aren't powerful enough to deal with it quickly.

    Also there are some weird bugs in routerOS every now and then, now maybe if they ever get around to releasing routerOS 7 and multi-thread it like they want to then it will be a lot better for full table BGP but at the moment I'd possibly avoid running one as your main core router unless you selling very low end services with no SLA or are really tight for money and want to use it as a stopgap.

    Edit:

    That's not an avoid Mikrotik, RouterOS has it's uses and you'll struggle to find much with equivalent functionality for the price, I use their routers at home and an infront of personal boxes no problem... Just not sure I'd be wholly comfortable with one being responsible for my entire network if it meant I'd lose money on it should I need to reboot it or it crashes.

  • patrick7patrick7 Member, LIR

    I used MikroTik CCR 1009's in 2 locations with multiple fulltables. The hardware is great, but the software is not able to handle that. I'm present at a local IXP which flapped some time and the CCR was not reacting anymore. Even after the port has been shutted, it was not usable. Reboot was the only thing to get it back up and running.

    I recently replaced all CCR1009 with SuperMicro 5018A-FN8T Xeon barebones with 16GB RAM, debian + bird and all problems have been solved. Loading 2+ fulltables takes about 1-2 minutes.

  • The router I suggested is based on a 36 core tilera chip. So the core supports about 60 Gb total SerDes which is bloody more than enough to deal with 40 Gb. This is even more true when considering that the Tilera chip used almost certainly is a model that supports full data plane/packet handling (header unpacking, classification, etc) in hardware.
    In case some here don't know it yet, Mellanox is behind Tilera and that company doesn't play with chickenshit in networks. They are one of the first addresses everyone turns to for n10Gb or n40Gb equipment.

    IIRC Mikrotik first build Atheros based stuff (even then not a capable proc and mostly used in CPE stuff), then Power Architecture based (quite capable) and the current higher end models are based on Tilera manycores. You bet that those same processors are in big name high end equipment, too.

    I didn't play with one of those "cloudrouters" but I'd bet that they have no problem whatsoever with 3 BGP tables plus a fat fw table.

    As I said: One must chose wisely with Mikrotik; quite similar models can be radically different inside. Example: They have another model with n*10Gb which has but a single core processor (I guess a power based one, which is nice but probably one of the troublemaker models mentioned in this thread).

  • patrick7patrick7 Member, LIR

    @bsdguy, as BGP is running on a single core (which is at 100% load with only 2 tables), I think 3 tables will cause problems. I'd be fine with (very)slow route calculation (which I experienced on the 1009), but a few other things are really bad. As an example, if you show advertisements (and you announce a lot of routes), it may be possible that the BGP sessions are dying with "Hold Timer Expired". It uses too much CPU to show the advertisements. Really? Experienced that too.

  • bsdguybsdguy Member
    edited March 2017

    @patrick7 said:
    I used MikroTik CCR 1009's in 2 locations with multiple fulltables. The hardware is great, but the software is not able to handle that. I'm present at a local IXP which flapped some time and the CCR was not reacting anymore. Even after the port has been shutted, it was not usable. Reboot was the only thing to get it back up and running.

    I recently replaced all CCR1009 with SuperMicro 5018A-FN8T Xeon barebones with 16GB RAM, debian + bird and all problems have been solved. Loading 2+ fulltables takes about 1-2 minutes.

    The ccr1009 has just 9 tiles and more importantly just 1 or 2 GB memory. No wonder that throwing 16GB RAM at the problem worked.

    Edit after your new post:

    I suggested a 36 core model with plenty RAM. It doesn't make a lot of sense to compare a model with about 25% of the performance and resources to that.

    As for the software, I myself said that routeros is perceived as unnerving by some (like myself) but it's working well.

    That said: I don't care a rats ass whether anyone buys or doesn't buy a Mikrotik router. In fact I even said that I myself don't like them a lot (reason: routeros being strange).

    But OP asked for a certain functionality within a rather low and tight bracket, so I tried to help by hinting at the CCR. I'm sure it's damn good enough for the job (else I wouldn't have suggested it) but I will certainly not defend this or any other Mikrotik router.

  • patrick7patrick7 Member, LIR
    edited March 2017

    @bsdguy no, ram doesn't matter. Maximum usage on the CCR1009 was about 900MB with 2 Fulltables and peering (I was using the 2GB model). CPU count also doesnt matter as Mtik handles all routing related stuff on one core.

    It works well as long as you don't do anything more advanced and you don't touch it.

  • daffydaffy Member

    I work for a small ISP in Norway, and we mostly use Mikrotik's in our routing stack. As core router we use the CCR1072 which in our use case works flawlessy. Mind you, we only push around 2.5Gbps, but for us a Juniper or Cisco-something would be extremely overkill when comparing price/performance.

    Thanked by 1datanoise
  • @patrick7 said:
    @bsdguy no, ram doesn't matter. Maximum usage on the CCR1009 was about 900MB with 2 Fulltables and peering (I was using the 2GB model). CPU count also doesnt matter as Mtik handles all routing related stuff on one core.

    It works well as long as you don't do anything more advanced and you don't touch it.

    Bewildering story. Sure, Tilera tiles can't be compared 1 on 1 with amd64 but on the other hand those tiles have a quite complete packet processing engine on the chip and, according to what you say, memory wasn't the problem either - yet changing to amd64 with lots of memory made the problem go away ... weird.

    Again, I don't like routeros but just because it feels weird to me. Under the hood it's an official kernel with lots of love and work by Tilera, now Mellanox.

    It seems you may be right insofar as some non-OS software was designed either lousily by the routeros people or it was optimized for Atheros toy processors (which were the Mikrotik standard for quite some years).

    I'm assuming that because the hardware can't explain it. But keeping data structures made for one kind of proc and using them on a completely different type of proc may well explain the issues.

    A while ago I was involved in a firewall related project and saw quite some problems arising from them using dyn. arrays to store - and look up! - millions of IP ranges. That whole thing utterly drowned as soon as one had a couple of ten thousand IP ranged. I changed the mechanism to an elaborated trie and voilà it worked nicely.
    That would also explain why those same chips are working very well in other boxes.

    Well whatever, it seems that there are indeed some problems in Mikrotiks software stack. And if I'm right I have bad news: The chances of Mikrotik touching that are slim. Changing a driver is one thing but changing one of the core data structures of their software years after it was developed are rather small (if the developers are even still available).

    So I guess I'll have to relativise my advice to: Mikrotik sells very nice boxen at an attractive price - but don't use them if you have more than a mid size company network in mind. Sad story.

  • patrick7patrick7 Member, LIR
    edited March 2017

    Yes, MikroTiks are great for home use. But as soon as you have >1.5 million bgp routes on it, it's not funny anymore. As said, I once ran /routing bgp advertisements .. print, and tens of BGP peers dropped with "Hold Time Expired". That because they run BGP on one single core which is wrong. The hardware isn't the problem - it's the software.

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