Mikrotik CRS3xx Switching
Introduction
MikroTik has been known in the WISP wireless world for a long time for their wireless PTP and PTMP products. More recently they have also started making WiFi products aimed at home, office, and enterprise networks. They also have several series of their “Cloud Router Switch” (CRS) switching line. This is about my experiences with the CRS3xx series, specifically the CRS309-1G-8S+IN and the CRS328-24P-4S+. I’ve had both of these switches running in my own network for the past almost 5 years.
Comparison
| Feature | CRS309-1G-8S+IN | CRS328-24P-4S+ |
|---|---|---|
| 10G SFP+ ports | 8 | 4 |
| 1G ports | 1 | 24 w/ POE |
| Powering | POE via ether1 and/or DC jack | 1x AC input |
| Operating System(s) | RouterOS or SwitchOS | RouterOS or SwitchOS |
| MSRP | $269 USD | $445 USD |
Feature Progression
Switches is a new-ish area for Mikrotik compared to routers or wireless devices. You’ve always been able to bridge ports and make them into small switches. Since launching their switches however their bridging/switching support has received a lot of attention and much-needed fixes. The CRS3xx series product line started coming out in about 2017, approximately 4 years after the 1xx line became available.
- 6.38 added support for spanning-tree to use hardware support.
- 6.43 added hardware port isolation, as well as hardware DHCP snooping / option 82.
- 6.48 added hardware LLDP specifically around voice VLAN.
- 6.48/7.1 also added initial bridge controller / extender support.
- 7.1 added hardware L3 forwarding, and hardware MLAG support.
- 7.1 also added the start of VXLAN
- 7.6 added support for IPv6 route offloading
- 7.14 added MLAG support for MSTP bridges
- 7.16/7.17 added PTP support for some router and switch devices
This list is not exhaustive but just a sampling.
Multi-Vendor Interop
Running a simple MSTP (single region) setup with HPE Comware, or Cisco Catalyst has worked well for me when needed.
As always, I would not recommend running multi-vendor spanning-tree as a day-to-day lifestyle choice, but it does “work”.
Overall
There are a lot of inexpensive switches available on the market. What this product does well is “be a switch” while running RouterOS which perhaps you’ve built your ecosystem around. There’s been an impressive amount of support added since the products released.