Hi all,

currently we have a cisco border router that is fast approaching its maximum capacity, i was wondering if anyone is using RouterOS to act as a border router.

we have 3 internet feeds from 3 different providers, with full BGP, and AS

how advanced is the BGP now days in RouterOs compared to cisco BGP? (i haven't used it)

also, what size device would people recommend for traffic in excess of 200Mbit Duplex.

i was thinking a MikroNOC 7500 1U Gigabit Router

also,

i was wondering how the OS would, if it can, handle 'traffic balancing'
as in, one of our links is 100Mbit, the other two are 40MBit each... can the mik os utilize the different links via bgp if we somehow tell it how much traffic each interface can handle?

Regarding load balancing, MikroTik's BGP implementation can't do anything outside of what the BGP protocol can do. You need to tune your inbound and outbound traffic with standard controls such as BGP local pref, weight, AS path prepending, communities, etc.

Quite a few people use MikroTik as a border router. I would indeed recommend an x86 machine since you want to handle three providers with full tables. Although, I'm not sure its as stable as Cisco's BGP implementation. Several users have posted about issues with BGP such as memory leaks, slow route lookup speed (ie '/ip route print where' compared to 'sh ip bgp…'), stability, etc. Search the forums and I'm sure you'll find many threads regarding issues with stability / performance of BGP on RouterOS.

What Cisco router are you using? Maybe its possible to tune that setup. Do you really need full tables? Having a full table only affects your ability to direct traffic outbound to the shortest destination. It does nothing for your inbound. You talk about wanting to balance your links…you could look at using AS path filters to reduce the number of routes you receive from your upstreams with smaller links, while still receiving a full table from your provider on your 100mbit link. This would effectively reduce the amount of memory used on your Cisco router and push more outbound traffic onto your higher bandwidth connection. Win win?

Cisco: Achieve Optimal Routing and Reduce BGP Memory Consumption

I have extensive experience with MikroTik and Cisco router platforms, and between the two I see no major compelling reason to switch. Look at tuning your existing setup. If you can't tune it to your needs then look at swapping the Cisco with a new product.

wealready dont get full tables, Static routs with maybe 10,000 local bgp routs.
memory on the router isnt the issue, its the CPU sitting at 99.8%

It has been tweaked and modded by cisco engeneers for the last 12 months to get more out of it but its simply too small a router.

What's the model of your current Cisco router?

If you're replacing a Cisco with x86 I'd lean more towards Vyatta. It's being used in datacenters with 10gbps NIC cards. The capacity of course depends on the hardware you give it. It's on par with Cisco or Juniper when it comes to ease of use and features.

However it doesn't come close to beating Mikrotik when it comes to flexibility, especially in QoS/traffic shaping.

If you want near Cisco level no frills stability, long heavily tested release cycles. and open source, Vyatta.
If you want sometimes quirky, incredible flexibility, quick releases, and a huge feature set for the money, Mikrotik.

I do a lot of network engineering for clients big and small. I use Mikrotik a lot because it's cost effective and stable enough. There are always those situations where clients need 5 9s of reliability. In those situations I wouldn't hesitate to put in a high reliability Cisco configuration, or a similar Vyatta setup if they don't want to spend the money on Cisco.

You can always do a high reliability setup with Mikrotik to mitigate the failure of an individual piece of gear. I'd highly advise testing new versions on an identical test setup before upgrading live equipment though.

we have 3 internet feeds from 3 different providers, with full BGP, and AS

That quote led me to believe you were receiving full tables from three different providers.

Please let us know which equipment you have. You given us the exact product you want to migrate to (MikroNOC 7500 1U), but not what you're currently using. That information would be useful in helping us assess whether or not a MikroTik would be a better fit for your operation.

How much aggregate traffic is that router pushing? What other features do you have enabled? Are running OSPF, NAT, DHCP, etc from that router?

One of our main thoughts is we want Full BGP routs, the only reason we don't have them at the moment is due to ram constraints.

Here is a basic display of our current setup.

the border router handles BGP and some firewall
the core router handles internal routing/networks and some firewall
(this time of day we do hardly any traffic)

my plan is to do the following.

and to have a spare unit encase of fail.

Great, thank you for that.

Yes, a 2800 series will not handle full BGP with three providers. If you stick with Cisco you may get away with a 7200 with a NPE-G1.

But, since you want to use MiroTik…go with the MikroNOC.

hi all,

so last night i tried to make the new MikNoc7500 active as a border router.

I installed all 4 of our 'peers' in the BGP table, and they all connected and received updated ect.
I had our IP range listed in the 'networks'
i had our AS number in 'instances'

i was able to ping (for example 8.8.8. from the router no problems,
however, my back end 7500 was unable to ping beyond our peers next hop. (as in our providers IP)

I know I'm forgetting something here, But basically tried to copy across what we had on our old cisco to the Mik but it would seem something is missing.

ty.