Cloud Router Switch 317-1G-16S+RM

First and foremost this is a cheap switch. It does have other abilities as a router but it's throughput may struggle while doing anything advanced.This is my 3rd now so I knew what I was getting.I suggest if you want to use the swOS part that you upgrade the firmware. Also bear in mind that no settings are transferred across when changing between RouterOS and swOS and vice versa.Also bear in mind that when you swap to using this as swOS the MGMT port will cease to function till it is configured so you will need to initially connect after rebooting to swOS via the SFP+ port then use the default IP address.My chosen use case is for a home lab and am using this switch as a 10Gb aggregation switch to give me more 10Gb capacity. The switch is one of two CRS switches that is connected via LAG to 2 stacked core switches to give some redundancy. My options were either this or a Unifi US-16-XG or Ubiquti ES-16-XG which were at the purchase time around £200 more expensive for the same 10Gb port count.

I have this running SwOS 2.13 (latest version as of Oct 2022) with 8 transceivers:1x MikroTik S+RJ10 (RJ45 / 10GBASE-T) @ 58-60C1x Finisar FTLX8571D3BNL-E5 (multimode fiber) @ 44-45C4x Finisar FTLX8571D3BNL (multimode fiber) @ 44-45C1x 10Gtek (fiber) @ 40C1x 10Gtek (RJ45 / 10GBASE-T) @ temperature not reportedThere is a minor compatibility issue with the 10Gtek RJ45 transceiver, as it reports as a multi-mode fiber transceiver which it is not, and it doesn't report temperature or voltage.I haven't noticed any performance problems. All transceivers are linked at 10 Gbps except the MikroTik S+RJ10, which I have connected to a 2.5 Gbps port on my router, so it operates at 2.5 Gbps.The fans run continuously at 8300 RPM which I don't think is max speed, but they are nonetheless much louder than expected, considering this switch is normally transfering less than 100 Mbps. CPU temperature is reported at just 36-37C, so I suspect the fan speed is based on the transceiver temperature. Fan speeds are not adjustable in SwOS, and I refuse to run RouterOS because of its extreme complexity, so I don't know if it would be any better there. This switch is replacing two 4-port fanless SFP+ switches (also MikroTik) so the increase is noise is annoyingly unnecessary, but I will tolerate it because it is located in a storage room where the fans do not bother anyone.All things considered, this switch is an unbeatable value if your network has need for many SFP+ ports, and steady fan noise is not a problem.

Nice and quite 10G switch. I can push 10G line speeds between nodes (Intel x520-DA2 adapters on each end connected with 5m Intel compatible DACs).Running Router OS (switch OS has issues booting, at least on the version I received - seems to not have an IP according their forums, 0.0.0.0 is not legal address :) ). I am not using this in any routing capacity though (I have my "router" configured as a switch, RouterOS seems to work better than SwitchOS). You can use the single RJ45 1G link as an uplink even in RouterOS (this is my uplink to the rest of my 1G LAN).Don't both with link aggregations - 10G single link speed but ~3G with any type of aggregation enabled. From what I gather this is because the single link connections are handled via the ASIC chip (i.e. directly in hardware) but as soon as you bond the connections packets flow though the CPU instead which has been repeatedly reported as maxing out in the 3Gb/s range. My testing seems to confirm this.Minus 1 star for including useless features (why even allow bonding when it slows down the connection to 1/3 of a single link despite having 2+x the link speed, it appears you can actually bond up 8x ports but why?) and for poor QA on their firmware side (seriously, how did the SwitchOS get out of QA with a 0.0.0.0 IP). Definitely lives up to the MikroTik "advice" of get it working the way you want on a specific firmware OS/version and don't touch it - once it works it works well but it's fragile.Overall very pleased, as a home lab user I have need for lots of bandwidth and throughput but enterprise tech is unnecessarily expensive - especially since I don't need five 9's reliability nor 24/7 tech support, I just need the raw compute power. This switch definitely does what I need it to once I got it all configured correctly and learned which features/buttons are functionally "broken".Notes:This fans do spin down all the way when the switch is cool enough (this includes the SPF+ modules not just the CPU/ASIC). If yours are not then check your firmware for updates.If you are using 1G SFP+ modules to connect to RJ45 links you may need to disable auto-negotiation of the link speed and manually set it to full duplex 1Gb/s speed and then re-insert the SFP+ to RJ45 adapter (you do this per port).Also some of the UI elements don't appear that you interact with them - don't be afraid to click everything, especially the rows/cells in the tables and grids. There is a lot more information and settings buried inside each table row and no indication that you are supposed to click the row to access it.

I was weary about the quality of this device due to some of the feedback. I took a chance however, due to my experience with the Mikrotik OS. Though there are room for improvements, the device is not as bad as mentioned. The best thing to do is to run it strictly as SwitchOS if you want to utilize the VLAN option as a switch. And of course you can run it directly as the RouterOS (more advanced) which makes it a router that bridges all the interfaces, turning it into a Router with switching function. VLAN in this mode will require a VLAN capable switch, which I think defeats the purpose of buying this device for it's switching capabilities and then using it as a Router instead. I highly recommend updating the firmware on it for both the RouterOS and the SwitchOS, before implementing it in your network.

I was looking to add 10Gbe networking to my home-lab and this Mikrotik device appears to be the cheapest (i.e. cost effective) means on the market currently to do that. Given the low price point you do have to be pragmatic to a point………A few points before getting into some specifics:1) This is most definitely built to a price-point. It is cheap. It is light. It is flimsy. You can tell it is made by a small company with limited resources. This is not an enterprise-grade device or even production quality, if your job depended on this (and arguably Mikrotik) then prepare for sleepless nights of worry. It is probably good enough for a home-lab.2) This is not a router or a layer-3 switch, it simply does not have enough processing power. The price is kinda of a clue at most this is a managed layer-2 switch. If I was being generous I would put this down to over enthusiasm from the marketing department but personally I think it is border-line false advertising (yeah technically you can route on it but technically you can also use carrier pigeons to carry TCP/IP traffic but….).3) GET YOURSELF A CONSOLE CABLE! A standard Cisco RJ45 console cable does the trick. I cannot stress enough that you need a console cable with this otherwise you will end up with a useless paper-weight.4) DO NOT USE SWITCHOS – or there is a good chance you will end up with a useless paper-weight.5) Every network vendor has their quirks and idiosyncrasies. If you are reasonably well-versed in one vendor’s technology, you can generally figure out another vendor’s approach to things with minor effort. Mkrotik are no exception but I do think they take the quirkiness to extremes. Prepare for a step learning curve. The networking technology is not difficult, it is figuring out the nonsensical and inconsistent Mikrotik way of doing things…..Now for some specifics regarding my journey with this device:When I received the CRS317, the box was already open (the seals being broken). My initial thought was I’d been sent a return/second, however, on inspection the contents appear to have been unmolested. I suspect the re-seller had to open the box to provide the proper UK power plugs.The small A6 instruction leaflet, supplied with the CRS, tells you to download the WinBox utility to configure the device and provides some basic info about the default IP address and user ID. I do not really see any point in the WinBox utility it provides no benefit over the web-interface that you get pointing a web browser at the default IP address (192.168.88.1). In fact both GUI versions look identically horrible. The GUI interface is busy – cluttered with lots of menu items some of which appear to effectively be duplicated functionality and tiddly-tiny indecipherable icons. Basically it looks like something from the early 2000’s (or even 1990’s). Notwithstanding the fact you really do not want to use the GUI interface to manage the CRS since one small mistake could render it unusable, some of the issues I found with the GUI:1) It does not seem possible to control all the settings and configurations from the GUI – there appears to be things that you can only do from the CLI. I found this trying to configure VLANs.. The option was there but did not seem to provide a means of easily assigning tagged and non-tagged VLANs to ports.2) The GUI (and CLI) do not really display the configured state of the device, they appear to only display the immediate operational state. For example: I found when setting VLANs on ports (e.g. /interface bridge vlan add bridge=bridge1 tagged=ether1 vlan-ids=10) if the port you were modifying was not currently operational (live cable plugged in) there was nothing in the GUI or CLI that would tell you that the VLAN was associated with the port. The only way I could find of doing it was by “exporting” the configuration in the CLI! So if you are looking in the GUI (or CLI) it looks like your configuration has not been accepted.3) The GUI (and CLI) have no feed-back, as far as I can tell everything is immediately applied without confirmation or notice. However, since the GUI does not really display stuff properly this can leave you in the situation where you are not sure if something has been applied.4) The GUI appears to have duplicated/replicated functionality – it is unclear if this is redundant or just subtly different. For example: the GUI has sections for “Switch” and “Bridge” functionality – basically in other parts of the universe “Bridge” and “Switch” are synonymous but in Mikotik’s GUI they appear to have different configuration items! Another example is updating – there are at least two different places where you can click a button to “update” software. I am not sure if both are firmware or if they refer to different types of software. Again there’s no feed back but it appears to do “something”.As I say the GUI is horrible, some of the other quirks that I have stumbled across:1) The Winbox utility will lock-up on occasions. I have not really used that much, I’ve tended to only use it out of desperation when I’ve been asking myself “Have I gone mad, is this really the case?” and been trying to double check something only to find Winbox no longer accepting any input or responding to any interactions.2) Somehow (not sure how) but I have turned command auto-completion on in the CLI. This means the moment I press a single key it instantly substitutes in what it believes to be the correct command. For example start typing /interface and before you’ve got to the “n”, the CLI has stuck in the word “/interface” for you. In theory, a nice idea but reality what you end up with is “/interfacenterface bridgeridge” and so on. Again this is a lack of confirmation or feed-back, other systems expect you hit a particular key (like tab) to do some form of expression-completion not instantly do it for you. This is an irritation to say the least, especially if you are copying and pasting commands.One of the worst issues I hit was with SWITCHOS. Apparently the device has two operating systems loaded into flash and you can manually configure which one you want loaded at boot-time. Clearly since this thing is useless for anything L3+ I thought I would default to the SwitchOS just to keep things as uncomplicated as possible…...how I laugh now! (I later found googling the Mikrotik forums that SwitchOS is even more horrible than RouterOS).One of the first things I did upon powering up the device and logging in was to update to the latest firmware (6.47.2). The next thing I did was set the device to boot SWOS (switchos). Other than the firmware, the device was still at factory defaults and I believed (according to the documentation) it would restart with SwitchOS still in factory defaults.After rebooting, the device was utterly unresponsive – this is how I learned the hard-way I should’ve done everything from the console! I had only had the CRS an hour and I’d turned it into a useless paper-weight! When I checked on the serial console it was sitting at some PROM/Firmware screen that basically gave a couple of options (reset configuration, check settings, reboot, upload configuration via X-MODEM!!!!! Really X-MODEM??) most of which are utterly useless….well reboot does reboot the box….for restoring the device to an operational state.Fortunately,there is a factory reset option! According to the official Mikrotik website you simply press the reset button for a couple of seconds as the device is booting. The instruction is literally a single sentence at the bottom of a webpage. Doesn’t work! This is my first experience of the utter quirkiness of Mkrotik kit.I have to confess that I have not researched this extensively since I am unwilling (too scared) to experiment on this device in case I render it utterly irreparable. Basically I found that the only way the “factory reset” worked is if you remove all cables from the device (network and power but you can leave the serial cable in) and then whilst holding the reset button reconnect the FIRST power-supply (the one nearest the heat-sink) and hold the reset button for at most around 5 seconds and then if the gods are smiling the system will start to load it’s emergency factory-default firmware. No other procedure seems to work. Hold the button too little then nothing happens; hold the button too much and it drops into network boot (BOOTP) mode and does nothing; don’t unplug the cables and nothing happens; simple (soft) reboot the device from the PROM menu and nothing happens; plug the second power supply in (not the first) and nothing happens…..As I say, I have not researched this extensively so cannot say if some of this quirkiness was unfortunate coincidence but in any case the factory-reset is most definitely not straight forward.So the $64000 question…...would I recommend this device or even Mikrotik? Nope, not really. I’ve been aware of Mikrotik before and I have looked into their devices in the past but this is the first Mikrotik device that I have bought and arguably it will be the last.Yes, this device is probably the most cost-effective way of adding reasonable 10Gbe capacity to your (home) network by some margin. However, I think it’s the old case of “you get what you pay for” (buy cheap, pay twice….etc...etc) and it appears far too easy to render this device utterly irreparable.. I have no faith or confidence in this device given it’s idiosyncrasies. I’ve managed to finally get a very basic layer-2 configuration onto it but I have not conducted any form of performance testing. When I do I fully expect it to not performs anywhere in the ball park of what it should (simply because the configuration is too bizarre and awkward to achieve anything approaching optimal).Caveat emptor!