Anyone have or used a Mikrotik CRS328-24P-4S+RM switch? I really want to move my test lab over to 10 gigabit and have a few 1gb ports for other things. I’ve been looking at used Cisco N5K series switches, and by the time I’m done getting the SFP+ modules, I’m going to be nearly the same price, and no POE+.
Plan is DAC cables from servers to switch and I need all four of the SFP+ ports for this.
Minimum is 12 ports total and that would squeeze my current setup because I have some other new equipment on this network too, and still need connection to my firewall for stuff.
The only issue might be the lack of details on the non-blocking throughput, the 48 port version only has a non-blocking of half the backplane speed, if this had only half it may or may not be an issue in the future. Also wishing it was POE++ for up to 90 watts per port, but I’d also expect that to be much more money.
Over in this thread, @survivalbloke just got one of those:
As for the non-blocking throughput… Mikrotik uses throughput to mean all-in-one-direction (i.e. half the ports input and half the ports output), and capacity to mean both-directions-together (every port both input and output). So its natural that throughput is half of capacity. This approach makes more sense when they are measuring routing performance including firewall and NAT, because the majority of usage for routing is download. You can see the exact numbers if you go to the “Test Results” tab of the page you linked. They amount to full wire-speed on all ports at the same time - the switch chip will never be a bottleneck. In fact on the block diagram https://i.mt.lv/cdn/product_files/CRS328-24P_181128.png (which is found on the “Support & Downloads” tab of the page you linked) they even call it “a non blocking wire speed switch chip”.
I was not aware of the Aruba Instant On series, I’ll have to take a closer look.
Looks like they don’t have the layer 3 features, but from what I’ve read the single core processor in the Mikrotek doesn’t handle a lot of layer 3 stuff all at once before performance decreases.
Just an update, I just bought a used CRS309-1G-8S-IN router, looks like a lot of dust on the thing, but should be here in a few days. I’ll have to buy some DAC cables and a few SFP+ to copper to get a 1G connection or two. Why this model, it was cheap enough to do what I needed right now, and should have most of the connections I need for right now. Assuming it works. Supposed to have 80gbps non-blocking which is probably twice what I’m ever going to try and move.
Really wish they had the OS user manuals in a PDF, I hate wading through multiple levels of web pages to read through the details. It looks like I’m going to want to run RouterOS, hope the dual core and “small” ram are enough. Maybe I’ll grab some “tear down” images when I pull the cover to clean the dust out.
Looks like RouterOS 7.2.3 is current and 7.3 is beta now.
Reading through the documents a little, I just noticed that you can run RouterOS on a PC with multiple network cards installed. Might make an interesting software defined network to play with, and might have been cheaper for me to build it out of old computers sitting on the floor gathering dust. I may look into this more deeply later before I send those computers off to recycling.
The RouterOS is different, but I’m managing to poke my way around. I bought two training books based on OS 6.4.x which is what I have installed right now. They were like $6 each on Kindle so not really a big cost, chewing my way through as time permits.
Also got into a fight with an ebay seller telling me that this 309 switch can not use 1GB SFP modules, even after I told him I researched it and they do work, and that I had some 1gb Cisco GLC-T modules working he still came back with a screen shot of the product page that says 8 10gb SFP+ modules.
Guy was a jerk and problem with the non-functioning module unresolved, going to earn a negative feedback on that one. I’ll just buy a couple more of the Cisco modules for the extra 1GB connections I need. Need to buy more SFP+ modules too, got a bad one and had to install a questionable module to get things working. Now if only my NAS had faster drives!
