Something I see pop up fairly regularly on a few of the forums, Discords, and subreddits that I hang out on is that the RB4011 is not capable of 10 gigabit routing

Guess what?

THAT’S WRONG

I’d be lying if I said that this xkcd wasn’t me sometimes:

Of course, whenever this pops up I’m not in a position to demonstrate the proof. It definitely can go almost full 10Gb.

But you say, it’s only got a single SFP+ port!

That’s what full-duplex is for!

I’ve got a number of these devices and have tested them extensively. The RB4011 is definitely capable of 10 gigabit routing, in a router-on-a-stick fashion.

The Proof

As this is something that comes up almost weekly, I have decided it’s time to officially document an RB4011 going almost full 10 gigabit.

For this setup, I reset the config on a RB4011 to empty, spun up a simple Debian VM, and connected an existing host and the VM through the RB4011.

As you can see, the hacky result on my desktop:

The Configs:

This config is about as simple as it gets. Two VLANs on the sfp-sfpplus1 interface, and IP addresses on the respective interfaces.

# jan/02/1970 00:27:33 by RouterOS 6.45.5 # software id = K5KS-T8WB # # model = RB4011iGS+ # serial number = xxxxxxxxxx /interface vlan add interface=sfp-sfpplus1 name=VLAN22 vlan-id=22 add interface=sfp-sfpplus1 name=VLAN2222 vlan-id=2222 /interface wireless security-profiles set [ find default=yes ] supplicant-identity=MikroTik /ip address add address=10.22.22.10/24 interface=VLAN22 network=10.22.22.0 add address=10.222.222.1/24 interface=VLAN2222 network=10.222.222.0

VLAN2222 is a new VLAN I spun up for this test, and VLAN22 is an existing VLAN on my network, where a host is running iperf3 -s

The Debian VM is also very straightforward. ESXi, with a few vCPUs (sometimes at higher iperf3 tests, the CPU can get tapped out), and network connected to VLAN2222

A static IP and default route, and we are ready to roll:

The Results

The results sort of speak for themselves. With an iperf3 to a host on VLAN22 (two streams), we have no issues going 10Gb:

10Gb yo

With a single stream, it fairs moderately worse:

Note that is on a basic 1500 MTU network, so I did not set jumbo frames.

And what’s the CPU doing during this?

Firewalls and IPv6

While I’m not going to do it here, I have done testing in the past with IPv6 and firewalling: