Question Rack mountable gigabit ethernet router recommendation

[cristi92b]

Could you please recommend me a rack mountable (19" 1U or 2U) router?
I need at least 1Gbps data transfer speed.
Open source OS is preferable but not required.
My budget is around 300$.

So far I found Mikrotik RB2011iL-RM (99$) which has a very good price but I am not sure how good they are. Does anyone have experience with Mikrotik routers?
NETGATE 7100 ($1199) is probably a good option but I don't want to spend that much on a router and 10Gbps+ is more than I need.

 

[kanewolf]

Could you please recommend me a rack mountable (19" 1U or 2U) router?
I need at least 1Gbps data transfer speed.
Open source OS is preferable but not required.
My budget is around 300$.

So far I found Mikrotik RB2011iL-RM (99$) which has a very good price but I am not sure how good they are. Does anyone have experience with Mikrotik routers?
NETGATE 7100 ($1199) is probably a good option but I don't want to spend that much on a router and 10Gbps+ is more than I need.

MikroTik routers are very good. But they are not user friendly. There are lots of videos and articles on configuring them.

What features do you require? Most rack mount routers will have pretty advanced feature set. If you need typical home router functions, you would be better off installing a shelf in your rack.

 

[cristi92b]

MikroTik routers are very good. But they are not user friendly. There are lots of videos and articles on configuring them.

What features do you require? Most rack mount routers will have pretty advanced feature set. If you need typical home router functions, you would be better off installing a shelf in your rack.

I need DHCP, static IP address, basic firewall rules, port forwarding.
I am planning to add TP-link APs with hardware controller and a NAS to my network but that should not require advanced router features.
LDAP and RADIUS for WiFi authentication would be nice to have but not required.

 

[kanewolf]

I need DHCP, static IP address, basic firewall rules, port forwarding.
I am planning to add TP-link APs with hardware controller and a NAS to my network but that should not require advanced router features.
LDAP and RADIUS for WiFi authentication would be nice to have but not required.

Since you are going to have wireless access points, and a controller for them, I would recommend you use Ubiquiti UniFI for all of it.
The dream machine pro SE -- https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-unifi-os-consoles/products/dream-machine-se has all the features including POE to power access points.

 

[bill001g]

Part of the issue is this is a actual "router". It can run routing protocols like OSPF.

Although I know it can run very advanced NAT functions what I don't see in their specs is the data rate the box can run when doing NAT. They have lots of other specs but I do not see that one on the page for the device. It might be somewhere else on their site.

Common devices used by home users are not actual routers they are better called gateways. Because they have far fewer functions they can do more in hardware rather than software. The key one is the NAT function. This is done with asic in consumer router and can pass 1gbit wan/lan.
Many actual routers since they can do much fancier nat rules do this with the cpu and software. Unless the cpu is very powerful it will bottleneck the traffic. Note this is also a big issue if you load third party firmware on a consumer router since there are open source license issues for using the asic basic nat accelerators.

You might want to do what we did when we needed some small like a 5 port switch and needed it rack mount. We bought a rack mount tray and them used double stick tape to mount the unit to the tray.

Almost all the function you want might be better done by a consumer router....check the specs on the microtik they are very nice but complex routers.

Your key problem is the NAT if you were not doing that then these type of devices have no issue passing traffic even with firewall rules filtering it