We are a small sized ISP looking to expand. Currently supporting +/- 3000 customers with the potential for more in the coming years. We are looking to replace our 7204 core router that currently handles BGP Peering and routing for our entire production and management network with something different. I want to know what the performance on the CCR is, what your experience with it is, and if it's capable of handling a large number of concurrent connections.

If you need more details from me, let me know.

Are you going to be doing just BGP and routing, or are you going to use filters on the traffic as well? We have 3 in production doing multi gigabit routing, each with full BGP tables from at least 3 peers, and they aren't breaking a sweat. We don't have any queues or firewall filters though, so I can't comment on how they perform with those enabled.

Hi nbeacham,

We're in a similar position to you so here's hoping we get some worth wile information...

Adyb

I have three BGP upstreams (same provider) in geographically different locations. The biggest pipe is connected to a CCR1036. We switched to it from the 7206 about 7 months ago. We have 500Mbps there and it just ticks along. The other two sites are running older x86 boxes with about 200Mbps each. I'm only taking partial and default routes. We don't have enough upstream diversity to care about full tables. We do have quite a bit of path diversity to the upstream.

If you have the budget, I would run one CCR for BGP. And other CCRs for NAT, queue trees and whatever else. Historically, RouterOS seems to have had issues with one device performing many functions, in our experience anyway. You have probably been doing everything with the 7204.

We have around 3000 access customers, including the DSL.

Our 7206 with NPE-G1 was running about 60% CPU with 140Mbps running through it and handling PPPoE for about 1,000 DSL lines and lengthy ACLs. I didn't want to push my luck when we upgraded to 500Mbps. We kept the 7206 as a DSL aggregation only box.

We see the CCR hit 60 to 70% during a 500Mbps DDoS. Usual CPU utilization is 3 - 5%. The CCR has been up since I loaded 6.12 on it, 136 days ago. It was not that stable on earlier revisions of RouterOS 6. Some of that stability is probably us learning not to try to do too many things on it, some is MikroTik fixing bugs. One CCR with 6.12 or higher may be able to handle everything the 7204 does, other than T1, DS3 or OC3 handling.

I replaced a 7204-G1 with a CCR1036 - it does BGP to one transit with full feed, plus about 3 IX's then iBGP (for both IPv4 and IPv6).

It has about 350~mbit through main transit provider - its about 600-700mbit aggregate traffic when considering traffic in from peering, transit, then traffic back out to LNS/customers etc.

It also does some basic firewalling (filtering, no NAT) plus some mangle packet marking (about 20 of them) on an interface that does about 140mbit avg, then runs queues on that interface based on the packet marks.

The CCR for the most part sits about 5-10% on the /system resources output, but profiler shows its probably closer to 15-20% (running 6.13, waiting to upgrade before reporting this as a bug).

It has handled 500mbit DDoS's before without much of a wind up.

I have a 2nd 1036 on hot standby, haven't had to use it yet.

Are you going to be doing just BGP and routing, or are you going to use filters on the traffic as well? We have 3 in production doing multi gigabit routing, each with full BGP tables from at least 3 peers, and they aren't breaking a sweat. We don't have any queues or firewall filters though, so I can't comment on how they perform with those enabled.

Just BGP and routing. Seems it would work for us then.