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Apologies if this isn't the correct place to ask this, this is the most suitable stack I could find;

I'm after some advice on VPNs; I want a solution that terminates VPNs that is easily scalable but initially I can start small. I don't want the first device to be thousands when there will only be a handful of connections to begin with.

I wanted to know, which is a more cost effective method for terminating VPNs; a hardware VPN device (like a Cisco ASR or a Juniper endpoint for example), a server (runing OpenSwan, OpenVPN, or a PPTP server), or a virtual appliance like Vyatta or pfSense?

Also which options provides the best throughput; hardware devices, vpn servers, or virtual appliances?

I will be terminating VPNs from work stations (Mac/Windows/Linux clients) so what would people recommend as a good all round solution; IPSEC, PPTP, others?

I hope these questions are clear enough if not just say and I will amend, thanks for reading and thanks for your thoughts.

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  • Do you have any idea on the number of simultaneous VPN users you need to support?
    – ewwhite
    Sep 6, 2011 at 19:49
  • Initially a handful, maybe 10, but I want to scale to a thousand maybe two thousand so it needs to be something that is cheap to start with, I don't want to spend thousands and have 10 people connect in, but eventually like a say a thousand users perhaps. Also, when it gets to that size it needs to have a high throughput. Obviously I would roll the chosen solution over several devices but I have heard of OpenVPN servers with 100Mbps NICs topping out at 200Mbps or less even, is this just myth though?
    – Baldrick
    Sep 6, 2011 at 20:39
  • I did some googling around out of curiousity. I came across this post: forums.openvpn.net/topic7188.html where some guy has 1000+ simultaneous connections (plus using TAP, which is kind of horrible), albeit with some kernel tweaking. You can also do some clustering, if one box isn't sufficient.
    – cjc
    Sep 6, 2011 at 20:54
  • So is OpenVPN the preferred method, does anyone have and experience with OpenVPN and hardware VPN appliances?
    – Baldrick
    Sep 7, 2011 at 8:12
  • Product and service recommendations are specifically off topic per the FAQ.
    – sysadmin1138 ♦
    Jan 16, 2012 at 3:23

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So essentially you're looking for a remote to central office VPN solution for workstations/laptops? Give OpenVPN a try. It does 2 users simultaneously for free and license packs are $50 for 10 additional simultaneous users. They even have a VMWare appliance you can download and set up in a few minutes.

If you're looking for permanent site-to-site VPN links, have a look at Vyatta. You can build a decent dedicated appliance with it for under $500 easily.

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  • If you want to set up OpenVPN yourself, it's not that hard, and it will be completely free, assuming you have a spare box and a bit of time to understand the security model and set up the certificate authority. Note that you'll need to install OpenVPN client on the other machines; there are good clients for Mac (TunnelBlick), Windows and Linux (from openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/downloads.html).
    – cjc
    Sep 6, 2011 at 20:39

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