Use MikroTik Core Router for routing and switching servers directly.
Use MikroTik Core Router for routing and switching servers directly.
You're looking to simplify your setup by consolidating the server and networking components. This approach reduces the need for multiple devices but introduces new challenges. The CCR2216-1G-12XS-2XQ router can handle dual 10G ports, which is great for your 8 servers. However, ensure it supports the required bandwidth and stability for your workload. Consider potential issues like overheating, firmware updates, and network latency. If you manage the configuration well, this could work well.
With that particular router, this is a perfectly fine plan, because all the ports are connected to a switch chip (the same family of chips they are using in the CRS3xx family, just a higher spec model that can support this amount of ports/bandwidth), and then the switch chip is connected to the CPU (where the “router” lives) via 4x25Gb connections (you don’t have to worry about managing this, it is effectively a 100Gbps connection). Meaning that for switching, and even most of the routing you are likely to do inter-vlan (pay attention to the limits of L3 HW offload here: https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/R...Offloading ), the traffic will stay within the switch chip and run at “wire speed”. My only recommendation about this is to wait another few months for RouterOS 7 to get a bit more polish, maybe wait for 7.2 to go “stable”, or for a 7.x release to be moved to “long term”.