Comments on: WISP/FISP Design: Switch Centric (SWC) Topology https://stubarea51.net/2023/07/06/wisp-fisp-design-switch-centric-swc-topology/ Whitebox Network Engineering , News and Reviews Thu, 22 Feb 2024 16:38:11 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.9.10 By: Mathias W https://stubarea51.net/2023/07/06/wisp-fisp-design-switch-centric-swc-topology/#comment-157800 Fri, 01 Sep 2023 13:03:08 +0000 https://stubarea51.net/?p=3103#comment-157800 We have actually recently started building like this but are actually in the middle of going one step further and virtualizing all our routers with XCP-NG and Mikrotik CHR. our hardware is refurbed with new warranty applied Supermicro Big twins, Giving us chassis with 4 HW nodes and 1st and second gen Epyc processors for about 3000-4000 euro where each node provides 46 cores 96 threads, 256 gig RAM. we then connect each node with dual 25 gig nics to mikrotik 25 gig switches and 100 gig uplinks to an core 100 gig mikrotik switch.

Doing this design allow us to build a full site with redundancy and all features being virtual except the physical cables in to the SWC switch layer. But everything else happens between virtual routers with virtual recources allowing us on the fly recource allocation and then the L2 is VxLAN private tunneling in the XCP-NG SDN controller.

The future is bright for all of us smaller ISPs with one or two gen older hardware with refurb warranty for virtualization of routers and players like mikrotik bringing the L2 100GbE to us smaller players at very good prices!

Great write up and thanks for reinforcing my decision on our design as the right one.

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