Manual:CHR

Cloud Hosted Router

Cloud Hosted Router (CHR) is a RouterOS version meant for running as a virtual machine. It supports x86 64-bit architecture and can be used on most of popular hypervisors such as VMWare, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, KVM and others. CHR has full RouterOS features enabled by default but has a different licencing model than other RouterOS versions.

How to Install CHR

We provide 4 different virtual disk images to choose from:

• RAW disk image (.img file)
• VMWare disk image (.vmdk file)
• Hyper-V disk image (.vhdx file)
• VirtualBox disk image (.vdi file)

NOTE: These are disk images, not importable virtual machine appliances

Steps to install CHR

• Step1: Download virtual disk image for your hypervisor
• Step2: Create a guest virtual machine
• Step3: Use previously downloaded image file as a virtual disk drive
• Step4: Start the guest CHR virtual machine
• Step5: Wait while RouterOS is installing itself and reboots
• Step6: Log in to your new CHR. Default user is 'admin', without password

See instructions how to install CHR

• VMWare
• VirtualBox
• Hyper-V

CHR Licencing

The CHR has 4 license levels:

• free
• p1 perpetual-1 ($45)
• p10 perpetual-10 ($95)
• p-unlimited perpetual-unlimited ($250)

60-day free trial license is available for all paid license levels. To get the free trial license, you have to have an account on the mikrotik.com as all the license management will happen there.

CHR running instance will indicate a time when it has to access account server to renew the license. If CHR instance will not be able to renew the license it will behave as if trial period as ran out on that router and will.

Paid licenses

These licenses will become available later on for a fee.

p1

p1 (perpetual-1) license level allows to run CHR indefinitely. It is limited to 1Gbps upload per interface. All the rest of the features provided by CHR are available without restrictions. It is possible to upgrade p1 to p10 or p-unlimited After the upgrade purchased the former license will become available for later use on your account.

p10

p10 (perpetual-10) license level allows to run CHR indefinitely. It is limited to 10Gbps upload per interface. All the rest of the features provided by CHR are available without restrictions. It is possible to upgrade p10 to p-unlimited After the upgrade purchased the former license will become available for later use on your account.

p-unlimited

The p-unlimited (perpetual-unlimited) license level allows to run CHR indefinitely. It is highest tier license and it has no limitations enforced.

Free licenses

There are several options to use and try CHR free of charge.

free

The free license level allows to run CHR indefinitely. It is limited to 1Mbps upload per interface. All the rest of the features provided by CHR are available without restrictions. To use this, all you have to do is download disk image file from our download page and create a virtual guest.

60-day trial

To take advantage of increased data transfer speeds, you will have to have an account registered on mikrotik.com. Then you can request desired license level for trial from your router that will assign your router ID to your account and enable a purchase of the license from your account. All the paid license equivalents are available for trial. A trial period is 60 days from the day of acquisition.

Getting the license

After initial installation CHR instance will have free license assigned. From here it is possible to upgrade license to some higher tier. Once you have a license all the work with the license is done on the account server where it is possible to upgrade license to higher tier unless it is p-unlimited already.

Upgrade from free to p1 or higher

Initial upgrade from the free tier to anything higher than that incurs CHR image registration on the account server. To do that you have to give your account name and password and desired license level you want to acquire. As a result, a CHR ID number will be assigned to your account on the account server and trial of 60 days license created for that ID.

Upgrade from higher tier up

Only upgrade from higher tier to even higher tier is possible at this moment and that is done on the account server. For changes to take place on the router itself renew command should be issued. At this moment, the license level you set for the renew command is not important anymore. Possible upgrades are as follows:

• p1 upgrade to p10
• p1 upgrade to p-unlimited
• p10 upgrade to p-unlimited