Click here for a PDF of this design Using ZeroTier for Mesh VPN connectivity.

It would likely still be less than 10% of the cost of a comparable VPN + hardware box solution.Īll of these components can be assembled and tested inside of a day for a handful of FW endpoints and once security policies have been reviewed and applied, full production can easily be achieved not long after that. The ZeroTier web controller is free for deployments up to 100 endpoints and requires very minimal investment to scale to thousands of endpoints.ġ0,000+ users – Even 10s of thousands of endpoints would still be a very moderate cost that would mainly be centered around cloud compute fees or physical DC/Campus hypervisor capacity.

This is an overview of a design we’ve put into production to facilitate enterprise level VPN connectivity without traditional drawbacks like scale limit, hairpinning traffic and expensive hardware and software licensing.ġ000+ users – All of the solutions used in this design are open source. We’ll be looking at the solution design below in the next few sections to explore solving the problem of remote worker VPN scale in a cost effective way. Open source and cloud solutions when used together can provide an incredible amount of scale and performance without a long ramp up period. Luckily, IT is much more focused on software and cloud solutions these days then putting out boxes for everything. Time to deploy – assuming both hardware and software licensing challenges can be dealt with in a timely manner, it may take weeks or months to deploy the additional capacity.Software licensing – taking a company of thousands and suddenly extending licensing to account for the entire company is a financial hurdle for most companies.Hardware capacity – most firewalls or routers have a fixed capacity for VPN sessions that must be deployed into a cluster to scale.With a traditional vendor solution that centers around a router or firewall that’s racked in a data center somewhere, this can be difficult to solve for a few reasons. IT departments are scrambling to figure out how to react with capacity to connect entire companies remotely for extended periods of time.

This would probably be a relevant topic on any given day in the world of IT, but given the current global pandemic due to COVID-19 (aka coronavirus), it’s become especially important.

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