SO I work for a medium sized Land Mobile Radio dealer in the Western US. As many of you can imagine, today's two-way radio systems are as much IP/IT, as they are radio! So with that need, we often have a need to transport both L2 and L3 traffic back to a dispatch center or 911 center where traffic may culminate.
I'd like to replace some of the "OTHER BRAND" gear, and here's a couple reasons why...
1: It's freakin' expensive! I get they have track records and such, but as much as you spend on their stuff, you'd think it could last 100 years! (Let's not play the 'show me your uptime' game!! )
2: It's currently not easy to get. It's not sitting on a shelf very often, and we have to wait months for it to get here.
3: Should we talk about their licensing and reoccurring costs!!???

Here's a concern with going to a Mikrotik:
1: It doesn't have a large market share (I can see the counters to this, saying it doesn't need to, for as reliable as it really is!)
2: Getting governmental goobers to not buy XYZ because it's on a state contract, might be difficult (Even when I try and isolate our networks from theirs!)
3: Can I make it as redundant and reliable as it needs to be.

I just took delivery of 2 of the new 5009 routers, and my plan it to put them in a lab environment to see how they perform over a period of time. My lab won't have the traffic passing through it like a real system would, but I may be able to help generate lots of test calls and other traffic to build that up. I like the idea of having multiple hardware independent devices for redundancy, but I'm trying to make sure using 4 (to get 24 usable ports) would be appropriate.
https://imgur.com/a/ksduMOj

My thought would be to use 1 or 2 power sources into each unit (If I use on DC fed, and the other A/C fed, I get power redundancy! +1), and link them together with either fiber SFP and short jumper, or use a copper port. I'd ideally have 2 links used for uplinks (one from each device. That gives me 12 or 14 ports for access devices. Need more ports? Add another RB5009. That gives me much hardware redundancy and hopefully enough port counts. The next problem to tackle is device management.
For Device Management, I was thinking CAPsMAN may be able to help here. setting up basic configurations then being able to clone them all too be the same. There might be a more elegant solution or maybe someone has already done this to use multiple devices in a pseudo switch-stack? It may also be just as easy / more simple to manage each device on it's own.

So.. I'm looking for anyone's input that might have put these (Mikrotik routers / switches) in place of other 5 letter manufacturers, and how well it was received and what kind of good / bad / indifferent experiences you might have had. One thing to keep in mind is this truly is "Public Safety Grade" radio systems, so I want to make sure what we're offering, meets all the goals of 5x9's or better uptime. That's 5 minutes and 15 seconds roughly, annually!

Thanks to the community for your thoughts and any insights you might have.
R

Most MikroTik devices have serial port usable for low level firmware recovery; the RB5009 series does not. There's a lively Doesn't RB5009 have a serial port?? forum discussion in progress that may interest you.

Reading RB5009 switch chip 88E6393X particulars on Switch Chip Features page is worthwhile. The 88E6393X supports Layer 2 hardware offloading but it's not in Layer 3 (L3 Hardware Offloading) page. Golden pages deep in RouterOS documentation which are tough reading first time but very useful are: Layer2 misconfiguration and Packet Flow in RouterOS pages.

Your objectives so far are quite general; don't expect strong response until an overall design emerges supported by specific requirements or questions. Details and specifics are goodness which draw in an audience who then become participants. Providing complete MikroTik device configuration privacy redacted exports accelerates participation as well.

IMO MikroTik is conscientious and diligent about fixing bugs but some slip by and are found in the field; review the forums carefully to understand the bug environment you're entering. Be prepared to rigorously vet every MikriTik update prior to releasing into production environment. There are examples in the forums of large commercial wireless deployments where MikroTik didn't work out. The five letter vendor uses it's gross margins to cover the reliability testing level costs done prior to general release.

Besides the RB5009, look at the CCR2116-12G-4S+ as something with more juice that doesnt break the bank and may be closer to what you need.
However, what you need, as stated is not really clearly delineated for any concrete pointers.

RB2009 is a good work hourse from home to small business to specific limited solutions in a rack/enterprise
CCR2116 is much more powerful from small business to enterprise uses with more flexibility/options including a dual redundant power supply!!

Needs:
1: Reliability!!
2: A DC power Option. Can be one AC and one DC, or dual DC. Prefer 48v capable without external converter.
3: Most of this is done in Layer 2, so doesn't need a lot of compute power. Occasionally, we'll need some basic L3 services, such as OSPF or VPN capability. IPSec would be preferred, if workable between Mikrotik and a 5-letter branded firewall.
4: Ease of troubleshooting. I'm not always around to help my guys, so any easy use of things like Winbox would be helpful. The CLI is where non-IT-ish folks get lost!

I know you'd like me to define more.. But there's really not much to these networks. Not a lot of fluff, as it's intended purpose it to pass critical voice and data communications, specifically for the radio system. So we intentionally don't throw other stuff on the networks that don't need to be there. We're using mostly L2, because most of the traffic that's needing to be passed is multicast withing a few different sites.

RB5009 is great value as firewall and router but it's not a Layer 2 switch. Look at CRS326-24G-2S+ for a little less or CRS309-1G-8S+IN for a bit more.

Read up on L3 Hardware Offloading and if requirements fall within L3HW limits ... be aware L3HW limits vary by model's respective switch chip model.
Once outside L3HW limits, CRS3xx routing performance falls off a cliff and RB5009 is better.

We all know where I stand on this.

Routing, absolutely.
Switching, probably.
Client serving Wifi??? If it's critical, I would advise against.
(See I can be diplomatic)

Until RouterOS 7 becomes actually STABLE I would not recommend the Tik Gear in Your Industry Sector ... Enterprise usage is dramatically different from SOHO usage from a reliability/performance perspective.

Routing : SOHO - OK ..... Enterprise - NO
Switching : SOHO - OK ..... Enterprise - ABSOLUTLY NO
WiFi : SOHO - NO ..... Enterprise - ABSOLUTLY NO
Firewall : SOHO - OK ..... SMB/Enterprise - ABSOLUTLY NO

Short answer is that it interoperates with just about any standards-based network gear and can be highly available in critical environments if designed properly.

If you really want to dive into more specific examples, I recorded a podcast with the Packet Pushers that goes into this topic in a lot more depth.


https://packetpushers.net/podcast/heavy ... -mikrotik/

So we're posting huge images now to compensate for the missing signature spam.

Y







e







s







!