Mikrotik crs510_8xs_2xq_in switches - anything to be aware of?

[MountainBofh]

At work we're looking into buying a pair of these for a isolated high speed network. We do not need any layer 3 or 2 features. Our requirements are hot swap power supplies, and 4 or more SFP28 ports. The Mikrotik looks like a good option. Is there any problems or gotchas with these? Good experiences? Are they picky with transceivers ?

 

[TRACKER]

I have good experience with mine already for 1.5 yrs. I use it with QSFP28 SR4 and CWDM4 modules from different brands (FS, Kaiam). It is not picky based on my experience.
it may require manual config of the speeds and encodings (fec91 for 100gigs). With latest firmware they fixed fan speeds to be slowly changing.
Before that it was on steps, like 0rpm, 3k rpm, 6k rpm.

 

[MountainBofh]

Thank you for the feedback! Any issues with the SFP28 ports? That's mainly what we're looking at use wise.

 

[TRACKER]

No issues with QSFP28 ports, but i had initially issue with AOC break out cable QSFP28 (100 Gbps) -> 4xSFP28 (4x25 Gbps).
Basically issue was port 1 and 3 on the cable were not wired correctly (cable was bought from fs.com) so i had to return it and then i bought SFP28 modules and fiber break out cable (not AOC) and since then everything works fine
So keep in mind break out cables can be picky sometimes.

 

[MountainBofh]

Gotcha. What I'm planning to do with these switches is connect 3 hypervisors and 1 storage server to each switch via SFP28, and then link the switches via a QSFP dac cable.

Technically we could do it all on just one switch, but we want two for redundancy (if one switch goes BOOM, we can just plug everything into switch two).

 

[ano]

I like mine! not been picky about SFP28 and optics, but some of the CCR sometimes doesnt like SMF CWDM4 on older FW

you can also configure mlag with hypervisors & mikrotik &between

 

[Chriggel]

This is a very solid switch. I have one sitting in my living room, basically using it as a desktop switch, connecting several 1G, 10G, 25G and 40G devices. I'm using 1000Base-T, 10GBase-SR, 25GBase-SR, 40GBase-SR and 40GBase-CR. All the transceivers (1G, 10G, 25G, 40G), AOC (25G) and DAC (40G) are a wild mix of whatever I had laying around and what I could buy from FS. They're all either directly from or compatible with Intel, Mellanox, Mikrotik, Dell, HPE and FS/Generic. They all work. Mikrotik doesn't artificially limit compatibility, they say that every module and cable will work, as long as the manufacturer stayed within the specification.

I found this to be pretty important: MikroTik wired interface compatibility - RouterOS - MikroTik Documentation

It's mostly a compatibility matrix of Mikrotik switches and their own transceivers and cables, with some specific configuration requirements for certain combinations, which might be important, but this actually wasn't the most important thing on this page.

Almost at the bottom, you can find this:

QSFP28 interfaces of MikroTik CRS5xx series and CCR2216 devices support following link speeds.

• 1x 100G
• 2x 50G (since RouterOS v7.12)
• 1x 40G
• 4x 25G
• 4x 10G
• 4x 1G

Not supported: 1x 50G, 2x 40G

100G links can be established either with autonegotiation or forced 100G speed.
2x 50G, 1x 40G, 4x 25G, 4x 10G and 4x 1G links can be established only with forced speeds and disabled autonegotiation.

Some of this could be expected while some of it caught me by surprise. There's also no real system behind that, at least I couldn't find it. And as far as I can tell, this information isn't available anywhere near the CRS510 product and support pages.