Wireguard bandwidth performance of the MikroTik CRS326-24G-2S+

Also see Real-world data on CRS309-1G-8S+ RouterOS Wireguard throughput

We tested the new Wireguard functionality MikroTik CRS326-24G-2S+ running on RouterOS 7.1beta6.

Our test setup consists of a Desktop PC with 1GBase-T connection and a virtualized server on XCP-NG, attached with a 10GB shared connection, both running Ubuntu. Note that the L2 switching infrastructure (consisting only of MikroTik CRS3xx and CRS610 switching with complete hardware offloading) is ignored here because due to 100% hardware offloading to the marvelous Marvell switch chips it has orders of magnitude higher performance compared to any L3 function, hence it will only have minimal impact only the overall performance.

Wireguard was being used without preshared keys. Hitherto, it is unknown to us whether PSKs will have an impact on throughput.

Scenario: Routing between two wireguard VPNs

Both the Desktop and the server were connected to two different Wireguard interfaces on the CRS326-24G-2S+.

The CRS326 routed between those interfaces. The virtualized server ran a netcat server while the Desktop ran the wireguard client. IP firewall was disabled during this test, but the switch still had to L3 forward the packets.

Throughput results

The effective throughput of L3 forwarding, doing one Wireguard decryption and one WireGuard encryption operation (both without PSK) is 108.1 Mbit/s(unidirectional. Bidirectional has not been tested)

This is an awesome result, considering that the CRS326-24G-2S+ is only ~120€ street price and is an awesome switch. But it seems like Wireguard is capable of making a high performance VPN router from just a managed MikroTik switch.

Reliablity considerations

Note that at the moment of writing this article, Wireguard is only available in the RouterOS 7.1beta6 firmware, which is not yet considered stable. While I have not experienced any problems that have affected reliability in any way, if you run a network where it hurts if it fails, you should consider using alternative solutions in the meantime.