VPN remote access to lan

Question

I am rather new to this. I have done some it/cyber defense competitions in the past and have some knowledge. I am trying to set up a group of about 5-6 xenserver boxes. I want to use xencenter to manage it but I do not want to remote into a windows workstation to use xen center. I read a vpn would help. But i am confused by vpns. So if i set up a vpn server in my network and thats all i do on that network. Then i login to the vpn from home. Will this let me be have a "local" connection to the xenserver's to use xen center? Or am I going to have to put each xen server on the vpn even if the vpn server is on the same lan? Just to add I was thinking of using OPENVPN on some linux for the vpn server.

Answer 1

A VPN is a way of connecting one or more remote devices with a network in a secure way - the traffic is encapsulated, encrypted, authenticated, and integrity checked.

But ultimately to the devices communicating over a VPN it looks pretty much like a router - where the VPN gateway behaves like the router. On one side of the gateway are your Xen servers, and on the other side of the gateway, over the VPN is your other machine, where you are running Xencenter.

So it isn't "local" in a network sense, but it is local from your perspective. The VPN traffic does need to be routed, in that say your xen servers are on 10.1.1.0/24, your remote machine might be on 10.1.2.0/24, and so the xen servers will need to know how to route packets for 10.1.2.0 to the vpn server.

You can normally do this by either adding a static route on your default gateway router to direct traffic for 10.1.2.0 to the VPN gateway.

But this will definitely give you what you want, by not having to use a Windows jump box inside the network that you must first connect to in order to access the xen servers. You can the VPN such that your Xencenter can on the client machine you are connecting from.