First of all, thanks for your good products and functionality.

At these moment our internal network is more or les the next diagram.

In our data infrastructure, all is rendundant (switches, power supplies, hosts, controllers ....).

In our comunications infrastructure we have some redundant ( ineternet connections, and others). Now we want to add a new CORE SWITCH in our data infrasture for redundant links and others.



Is possible to works with loops with CRS226 - RSTP funtionality (hardware/software)? I found in some topics that is not possible with hardware, but I don't understand why can we do with software? Can someone explain how works switch functionalities and bridge?

We want to creates the next diagram If it is possible and we did these with software RSTP, the normal operation is at wirespeed and only RSTP traffic goes trhought CPU or all goes throught CPU?

Thanks a lot,

Whoever concerns -

for sure you can archive this with software setup with routerOS - the trouble though, CPU on routerboards are by miles not powerful enough to handle such speeds you suggest and want to archive.

As of today - I am still using high frequency CPU rack mount servers with ROS x86, 2 x 4 port intel or quad 10G fibre cards, 2GB RAM, 2 x 72GB disks, to deal with 10G backbone traffic, traffic which has to be software processed by ROS and needs to be near wire speed (ROS switch chip is very limiting)

Some of my routers are even installed on VMware Clusters now nicely utilizing VMXnet3 for bundling physical interfaces.


The main issue of ROS, single CPU threaded per session.


If this is not an option, Cisco.

Because MikroTik has not implemented STP/RSTP in the switch chip hardware, you would have to use a software bridge, which is processed at the CPU instead of the switch chip. The CRS line of products does not have a strong enough CPU to get anywhere near wire speed across 24 ports. There is one way you can get around this limitation however...

If you build a stack of CRS's using the 10Gbps SFP+ ports, but put a CCR (like the 1036-8G-2s+) on either end of the stack (using the SFP+ ports) and run a direct link between the two routers using their second SFP+ ports, you can achieve a fully redundant setup that does support STP/RSTP. On the CCR's, you would bridge the SFP+ ports and enable STP/RSTP which would logically eliminate the loop until one of the 10gb links failed. You would also set up VRRP between the routers to ensure high availability there. The biggest limitation here is that the switch stack only has 10Gb inter-switch links as MT does not support a stacking backplane. 10Gbps may not be enough depending on the size of the stack and the amount of layer 2 traffic you need to forward between switches.