MikroTik CRS504-4XQ-IN Software and Management
MikroTik offers management in three ways: WinBox, Webfig, or a CLI. Many networking power users will go directly to the CLI.
Still, in the sub $700 for a 100GbE switch price bracket, we sense that many users will want something easy to understand without learning a CLI. For that, there are two graphical management options. One is WinBox, MikroTik’s desktop application.
The other, WebFig, has a very similar set of functionality, but it runs in a browser rather than running as a desktop application.
Today’s 100GbE switches typically feature CLI-only management. Especially those that come via off-lease eBay specials. Having a management interface that is accessible with a GUI to a broader audience is important in a switch like this.
Aside from the management itself, MikroTik is using a higher-end switch chip than is found on many of its CRS300 series of switches, so we get more features.
One feature we get is the ability to do L3 hardware offloading. That gives a significant boost in performance when it is enabled. Here is the guide on that L3 HW offload feature.
All told, MikroTik is adding incrementally more features, but the L3 HW Offload one is perhaps one of the biggest it has added in some time.
MikroTik CRS504-4XQ-IN Performance
In terms of performance, we were able to get over 90Gbps on average through each port using our new FPGA-based traffic generator. We are leaving performance on the table here since that is a new setup we are still tuning. Still, that is not a bad result.
MikroTik has fancier test gear than we do, and here are MikroTik’s numbers:
Realistically, these are not the same as we get from higher-end switches, but they are also not bad with one exception: the routing figures. MikroTik uses the single-core 650MHz CPU to route traffic. Doing anything over the CPU yields very low performance. Our suggestion is to use only the Marvell Prestera hardware features.
Next, let us get to some of the challenges with a lower-cost switch like this.
The Biggest “Gotchas” of Cheap and Low Power 100GbE
Still, this is not a perfect switch. Sometimes to swap between 100GbE and 4x 10GbE SFP+ or 4x 25GbE SFP28, you end up tracking down cable/ NIC issues. We have had 1 in about 30 breakout cables we have used to an Intel E810 NIC we used for How to Install an Intel E810 100GbE Network Adapter in Windows 11. Often this is a FEC error. We have not seen the issue connecting to the MikroTik CRS518-16XS-2XQ-RM‘s 100GbE ports. On the one hand, 1 of 30 does not seem like a lot to us (~3%), but if you are that 1 of 30 individual, then you are going to be spending some time troubleshooting and may not love the switch.
The other big one is a huge missing feature. With 100GbE, 200GbE, 400GbE, and so forth networks, RDMA has become a mainstream feature and RoCE (V1/V2) have become extremely popular. This is largely due to the amount of data that has to move through the network stack. Bypassing that network stack via direct memory to NIC transactions saves an enormous amount of CPU cycles. We could not figure out how to get features like PFC working on this switch. We went to the MikroTik help docs and searched for RDMA, and we got absolutely nothing.
Larger 100GbE switch vendors have libraries dedicated to RoCE, iWARP, and more. Since that is something that many 100GbE users want to use, usually, there is documentation around it on a vendor’s site. We checked the MikroTik Wiki as well. It would be nice if there were simply an entry talking about RDMA networking.
We looked up the Marvell Prestera 98DX4310, and the spec table we found did not say that the switch chip supports it.
To us, that is the big feature miss. With 100GbE networking, RoCE(v2) is one of those features folks will want to use. There is still a lot you can do over a switch like this, but RoCE is probably not something we are going to see.
Taking a step back, this is a <45W and <$699 switch, so there are features that we just do not get. There may be some troubleshooting. We just upgraded our units to RouterOS 7.7, and we will see how that goes. New RouterOS versions can have noticeable bugs, but we have not run into those just yet.
Next, let us get to power consumption and noise.
IF my old data center pals decide to give me a couple used 2U/4Node Rome quads in say 2025, THEN this switch (with a couple 100/25Gbit quad breakout cables) would make for an excellent $HOMElab upgrade in my 12U rack.
It’s a shame 100 GbE networking is so power hungry – with the exception of this switch obviously. I recently got hold of a Mellanox ConnectX-6 100 GbE NIC, and the Linux boot messages said the card was requiring 75 watts from the PCIe slot. Even with a quiet fan blowing directly on it, it got too hot to touch, so apparently a faster/noisier fan is needed.
Hopefully newer generations using less power will hit the second hand market soon so we can have 100 GbE at home without turning it into a deafening sauna.
As for MikroTik, my experience hasn’t been fantastic. I first bought a CRS309 (8x 10G switch) and it emitted a buzz and died when I powered it up and had to return it. The second item I bought was an RB5009 which wouldn’t power up, and it turned out they’d listed the wrong specs (since corrected) and said it supported PoE on ports it did not, so again I had to return it as it wasn’t possible to make it work in the scenario I had planned.
The replacement CRS309 worked well enough, but it annoys me that if you change the wrong settings, it can suddenly pass all traffic via the CPU and then without warning your throughput suddenly drops to hardly anything (as mentioned in the article). It’s only after reading the fine print do you discover that while many options and modes are available, only a handful will actually work at wire speed.
So while I used to think MicroTik made some pretty interesting hardware, I’m less keen these days given how much research you have to do over every little detail to make sure the product you’re buying can actually do things that go without saying in other products. I guess that’s just the cost of cheap hardware.
The main issue with Mikrotik is reliability, they still sell a switch that has know issues (CRS354), they still sell a router that tends to reboot/crash for unknown reason (CCR2004) and they seem to find this normal, they just need to find a software workaround..
You have threads on their forum spanning over two years about issues that never get fixed, essential features that get removed from ROS6 to ROS7 and take ages to be reimplemented.
Now their boxes have very nice features for the price, ROS / Winbox is something the big brands should take inspiration from but the fact that you never know how stable their device will be in your use case is really a concern.
Completely agree with netswitch. Its not reliability though its professional integrity.
I agree with netswitch. Having worked almost exclusively in the SMB market over the past decade Mikrotik products were always an option that never was. Their capability to price on paper was a no brainer, but the reality was always that the client would rather purchase supported “big name brand” equipment for double or more the price with peace of mind attached. The homelab and entry level seems to be the only real market they have presence in.
What network devices did you attach it to? Was there any issues with getting the QSFP28 ports to connect to other hardware on the other end? I am just learning about transceivers and it seems to be a minefield!
I have had one of these for the last 2 weeks, and my experience has so far not been great. The device is simple to set up, and with their recommended cables connects ok. However it has dropped out twice now with very little going on. The switch has simply crashed. Power down and up and it starts to work. I am running through various options, but running two connections with 1 QSFTP28 running at 40G -> 10G to a Unifi 48 port switch, and one port running at 100G->25G to a Intel based 710 based card, so its not exactly complex. I only have a few servers to add, but so far I cannot because of reliability. I will probably be jumping out soon and just spending proper cash on a bigger switch, as this has burned too much time now.
Hi, I am new to the networking space. Bought this switch for my home lab. And got 4 used Nic’s to test. I got a 10gb, a 25 gb(Broadcom), a Mellanox cx455a, and a Mellanox cx555a. The 10 and 25 gb nic works well with breakout cable from the crs504. My windows machine was able to recognize either the 10 or 25 gb nic. The other machine of the network is running Truenas and has driver for the 25gb nic. Smb access from windows to truenas was amazing compared to my previous setup of all 1 gb connections. However, I can’t get the cx455a nor the cx555a to work on Windows 11 nor Truenas. They even get recognized in Truenas. In Windows 11, they are recognized in Device manager after I ran the device drivers from Nvidia, but they don’t show up on the Ethernet list nor will they accept dhcp allocation. I manually set their ip and they are not recognized by the switch. RouterOs sees the dac cable on the switch end but no link. Can anyone help me to get the 100 nic’s working in windows?
Can a single QSFP28 port on the switch be split into combined 10Gbe and 25Gbe ports? For example 2x 25gbe and 2x 10gbe? Or must all be the same speed (which are split from one QSFP28 port on the switch)?