OpenVPN Access Server ESXi 4.1 Installation Guide

Posted by ePlus on November 14, 2011 Leave a comment (0) Go to comments

In the this tutorial we will be going through deploying a OpenVPN Access Server (AS) from scratch in a VMWare ESXi 4.1 environment. This should be perfect for a home VPN server (due to licence limitations of a maximum of 2 users being connected at the same time)!

Good luck and read on!

Step 1

Open VMWare vSphere Client and go to File > Deploy OVF Template

Step 2

In the Deploy from a file or URL box enter:

http://swupdate.openvpn.org/esxi/OpenVPN-AS/OpenVPN-AS.ovf

and click Next

Step 3

Click Next to confirm the OVF Template details

Step 4

Enter a name for the server or leave the default and click Next

Step 5

You can leave the defaults and click Next

Step 6

Click Finish to begin the deployment

Step 7

VMWare doing it’s magic

Step 8

Once the deployment has successfully completed, click the Close button

Step 9

Back in the vSphere Client Power Up the OpenVPN Access Server which has just been deployed and go to the Console tab

Step 10

Once the server has finished starting up you should be at the prompt screen. Login with the following details:

Username: root

Password: openvpn

Step 11

Once logged in simply run ifconfig to displaying the network configuration (if any, which there shouldn’t be). It should look like this:

Step 12

As there is no configuration for eth0 we’ll configure it with a valid IP address within our LAN:

openvpnas:~# ifconfig eth0 inet <ip address> netmask <netmask> broadcast <broadcast>

We’ll turn on our eth0 interface:

openvpnas:~# ifconfig eth0 up

Once it is up we’ll see if we can ping the internets:

openvpnas:~# ping google.com
 ping: unknown host google.com/1

If we can't contact the internets then we must add a route to our gateway (usually the routers IP address):

1openvpnas:~# route add default gw <gateway>

Then we test again with the PING command:

openvpnas:~# ping google.com
 PING google.com (74.125.79.99) 56(84) bytes of data.

Step 13

Now that we have internet connectivity we can SSH into the server with the IP address which we set in Step 12 and click Open

Step 14

We'll accept the certificate by clicking Yes

Step 15

We'll login with the same details as the ones we used for logging on via Console in our vSphere Client:

Username: root

Password: openvpnas

Once logged in we'll update the OS with the following commands:

apt-get update
 apt-get upgrade

Once it has finished updating we'll configure OpenVPN Access Server with the help of the wizard by running:

/usr/local/openvpn_as/bin/ovpn-init --force

The wizard is very good and simple to use and most of the defaults should be good enough to get connected via the web interface.

Once the wizard has finished simply set a strong password for the openvpn admin account which you connect via the web:

passwd openvpn

And finally before logging off change the root password:

 passwd root

Step 16

Simply go to:

https://<listeningip>:943/admin - Admin UI
https://<listeningip>:943/ - User UI

Accept the certificate and add it to the trust it zone

Step 17

And finally you should be able to login with the openvpn username and the password which we set with the passwd openvpn command in Step 15

Finish

Once everything has been configured correctly, the below page should come up after we login.

In the future we'll configure our OpenVPN Access Server to our likings, but for now, you should be able to VPN in providing that you have forwarded port TCP 443 and UDP 1194 to the OpenVPN Server!