Re: [Openvpn-users] Hardware Requirements

[James Yonan <jim@xxxxxxxxx>]

> We are thinking of running over 60,000 users using OpenVPN, with fairly 
> low traffic (i.e. less than 50-100kbits per user).
> Not taking into account redundancy requirements, what would be the 
> hardware requirements for the server side (e.g. processor, RAM, no. of 
> servers etc) for this type of deployment?
> Has anyone else tried a deployment on this scale? Are there any other 
> things I need to take into account etc?
> Thanks for your help
> Nicky

Is that concurrent users?  That's a huge number, and if it's concurrent, 
you'd be pushing the frontier of what's been attempted with OpenVPN, at 
least to the extent of what's been reported on the list.

Having said that, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work if you're 
smart about load balancing.

OpenVPN has some basic load-balancing features, for example the client
does the web browser trick of choosing at random from multiple DNS A 
records to resolve the OpenVPN server to use.  This makes it possible to
distribute a single client config which can connect into a server farm.

A few more details:

OpenVPN uses about 75Kbytes of virtual memory per user, so if all 60,000 
users were logged in at the same time on a single machine, you would be 
using about 5GB of RAM.

And at, say, 75kbits/sec per user, that comes out to 4.5Gbps bandwidth.  
A standard single-processor 2Ghz P4 machine could probably saturate
50-100Mbps, as far as the crypto is concerned.  That's a 50 to 100 machine 
server farm.  Less if you use SMP boxes + hardware crypto acceleration.

James


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