Is OpenVPN an appropriate VPN solution for our non-profit organization?

Question

We are a non-profit organization on a budget looking for a free VPN solution to replace LogMeIn Hamachi. Our organization consists of a central office (1 Windows 2003 server, 25 workstations), 2 laptops which are often taken off site, and a remote office with 2 desktop PCs. Everything is running Windows 7.

Complexity of configuration is not a problem, so long as it can be made user-friendly for the users themselves to work with.

Hamachi has been perfect for us: automatically creating a split tunnel VPN connection in the background that users never even knew was there or had to initiate. Browsing to mapped server drives when away from the office just magically worked as far as they were concerned.

Does anyone with experience using OpenVPN have any thoughts on how well it might suit our environment? Could I give our users the same easy experience that they are used to with Hamachi? I.e. I don't want them to have to do anything to start the VPN connection when using the laptops away from the office.

A major consideration for us is split tunnel - we need it. We don't want regular web traffic going to remote sites or devices to be directed over the VPN connection as this will unnecessarily deteriorate the user experience if streaming video content. 95% of traffic won't need to go through the VPN.

If OpenVPN could work for us, would we be looking at doing a router-router connection or PC-PC via software? I'm guessing we would need software as the laptops would be behind different routers depending on where the user is working off site.

Any thoughts from experienced OpenVPN users would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

I had similar situations in my first job: linking Krakow office to Paris office, didn't work with remote laptops though. As far as I remember, there are some windows openvpn tools that will allow you to quickly connect, but at the time I've been using them, they were rather harsh, as they were only GUI additions parsing openvpn's output. Openvpn is itself highly configurable tool, hence you can push routing directives to your laptops while connecting, and do very flexible configurations (as split-tunnel - you forward only needed traffic through the vpn). This will need you to work through the file-based configuration.