(Un)stable VPN connections to RRAS

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Our VPN solution is based on RRAS running on Windows Server 2016 running on ESX 7.5, through a Fortinet Firewall.


For a while we've been having VPN connectivity issues.  Users who could connect one day were failing to connect or connections were dropping.   It is your typical IT nightmare - nothing changed in either client or server config and things just worked or failed randomly.

It got so bad (Execs got involved!) and we are now implementing a new solution and moving away from RRAS.

In any case I began last month by finally "giving-in" and rebooting the servers each night (I've an Orchestrator job which checks the VPN connections and reboots the server if there are none)

This seemed to help and connections were a lot better.

I did some more trawling the internet and found some really old posts that VMXNET3 adapters caused issues with RRAS and NAT (which I am doing)  So I reconfigured to use E1000.

Again another level of stability!   Finally I remembered a post I made ages ago when first putting in the VPN where I used a remote NPS box and found that having NPS on the RRAS box made things faster and more stable.   This made me look at the IP addresses allocation, which was using DHCP.   I changed this to use a pool of addresses (the same IPs as DHCP just not using DHCP)

BINGO - now we have a really stable RRAS.

Bit of a shame as it is too late to save the solution from the bin as the new solution (OpenVPN) is now in place and gaining traction.

Thought I would put this out there though as something I found and might forget but also might help some others with unreliable RRAS services...

In summary

DONT USE VMXNET adapters
DONT OFFBOARD NPS
DONT OFFBOARD DHCP

It worked for me.

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