OpenVPN Support Forum

Dear all,

Can someone point me to the minimum HW requirements, to run an OpenVPN server using the following details:
1- Server will be a CentOS 5.5
2- Up to 10 clients might access the server
3- VPN will be used to tunnel VoIP calls only, and that shouldn't be more than 5 concurrent calls at the sametime
4- Clients will range between Windows, Linux, Mac and iPhone

Any pointers will be very much appreciated.

A single core at 1+ GHz, 512 MB of RAM will be fine.

I've ran openvpn on a 600 MHz pentium III , 512 MB of RAM and was able to connect 5 clients without issues; I must add that I did not use VOIP over that line.

Thanks for the input, I'm looking at reducing our costs, and instead of purchasing a separate server, we were looking to share one or more of our previously available servers for the VPN.

I've been testing with VoIP these couple of days, and I have to tell you, it's working like a charm... Windows, Mac and iPhone clients!!!

sergani wrote:Thanks for the input, I'm looking at reducing our costs, and instead of purchasing a separate server, we were looking to share one or more of our previously available servers for the VPN.

I've been testing with VoIP these couple of days, and I have to tell you, it's working like a charm... Windows, Mac and iPhone clients!!!

You probably don't even need a Pentium 3 to do this.. OpenVPN isn't really that resource intensive..

I've been running 2 openvpn-server instances on a 800MHz VIA C3 processor with about 10 concurrent users on the 2 serverinstances and i was still able to push 20+ mbit/sec through the server.

It just all depends on the amount of data/second and the amount of latency which is acceptable for your use.

the most cpu-intensive task is initializing the clients (or renegotiating the keys) so if your clients aren't continously flip on- and offline, you'll be fine with this setup.

Thanks guys for all your input!!

I'll be running my setup on a much better server; Dual Xeon E5504 @ 2.0 GHz, 8GB RAM. My only concern was that the same server is running a MySQL server for billing purposes, and both applications should not affect the server's overall performance in anyway.

I believe I should be then in the safe side, and I'll be testing and monitoring the HW performance over the next period of time.

no problem; closing topic