Exciting news for CHR in RouterOS 6.42RC

CHR has been the best way to deploy a virtual version of MikroTik’s RouterOS for a long time now. The dedicated virtual version includes some additional drivers and whatnot to make sure that it plays nicely with the popular virtualisation programs out there, Xen and VMWare being the 2 big ones everybody tends to go for.

Whilst some instances of CHR can now be found even on Amazon AWS there was still this niggle for those running Xen and VMWare that bugged them, traditionally on a “normal” VM you install it and then run the relevant “additional tools” installation so that the host cna pull out some information from the guest and also certainly in VMWare’s case, soft shut down or reboot the machine rather than a hard power off (we all know how RouterOS likes to log that as a fault!)

With 6.42RC things have changed though! Both xen-tools and open-vm-tools can now be found within the package and to ensure this wasn’t a joke I quickly span up a machine from the supplied OVA file and there it was feeding it’s name back to me as well as being able to soft reboot it. Good times!

A word of caution though, I personally would never recommend anyone use an RC for anything other than testing. New features introduce new bugs that need to be ironed out, whilst the wait for 6.41 to go to bugfix had started, now the wait is on for 6.42 to go to current!

you can download the latest version and see all the change logs openly on the Mikrotik website just here.