OpenVPN support in Azure VPN gateways

Today, the Azure networking team announced the General Availability (GA) of OpenVPN protocol in Azure VPN gateways for P2S connectivity. OpenVPN is an open-source software that implements a virtual private network (VPN) connectivity. Since OpenVPN is widely used in the industry, a lot of devices already have an OpenVPN client built-in. OpenVPN support for Azure VPN gateways should make it easy to set up new VPN connectivity to Azure virtual networks.

To use OpenVPN, you can now just simply select the tunnel type OpenVPN. You can find more information about how to set up an Azure VPN gateway on here.

We are announcing General Availability (GA) of OpenVPN protocol in Azure VPN gateways for P2S connectivity. OpenVPN is a popular open source VPN protocol supported in all major platforms (Windows, macOSX, Linux, Android) and available pre-installed on several WiFi routers and IOT devices. Adding OpenVPN protocol to Azure P2S VPN greatly expands our client footprint for TLS/SSL-based VPN customers and ecosystem.

– Ali Zaman, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft

To enable OpenVPN on your gateway you can run the following Azure PowerShell commands. Make sure that the gateway is already configured for point-to-site (IKEv2 or SSTP) before running the following commands:

$gw = Get-AzVirtualNetworkGateway -ResourceGroupName $rgname -name $name
Set-AzVirtualNetworkGateway -VirtualNetworkGateway $gw -VpnClientProtocol OpenVPN

You can find more information about OpenVPN support in Azure on Microsoft Docs:

• Configure OpenVPN for Azure point-to-site VPN Gateway
• Configure OpenVPN clients for Azure VPN Gateway

Next to the Windows Server Azure Network Adapter, which allowed you to configure P2S VPN for Windows Server directly from Windows Admin Center, this is another step to make connectivity to Azure even easier. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments.

If you want to learn more about Azure networking in general, check out the recording from my Microsoft Ignite The Tour session in Amsterdam, where I was speaking about the basics of building a Hybrid Connectivity with Microsoft Azure.