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I have an Amazon EC2 server instance running Windows Server 2008 R2.

I need to setup a VPN connection between this machine and one of my clients. The purpose is that my server is going to pull data from one of their database servers.

What is the best way to set this up?

From my desktop (Win7) I can use Windows Networking to "set up a new connection or network" and get access to their LAN.

Is that the same way I should configure my server? Basically I only want traffic that is actually destined for their server to go over this connection. Bear in mind that at some point (in the very near future) I'll have several of these configured.

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Amazon offers 'Virtual Private Cloud' - essentially a private isolated network, and a VPN gateway that you can use for secure communication to the VPC. Sounds like what you are looking for. Alternatively, it is possible to setup OpenVPN between an external server and EC2, and/or between multiple EC2 instances (not sure how this would work on Windows). –  cyberx86 Dec 9 '11 at 2:39

3 Answers 3

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Check this out, what you really want to do, is get a router / VPN config in Amazon that can act as a central point for VPN connecions Just be mindful of security.


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Check out tinc: http://tinc-vpn.org/ It is a fairly robust alternative to classic VPN implementations: It doesn't need a star-like client/server setup. Every node can be set up to try to establish a VPN connection to the other node(s) on its own but it really only needs one of these attempts to succeed for the tunnel to work.

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I ended up configuring RRAS on the server such that I have a specific IP address that gets routed through an on-demand VPN connection to the client.

Amazon VPC sounds interesting, but it costs an extra $0.05/hour ($438/year) for something that does far more than I currently need.

Thanks all.

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