Support Forum
The Forums are a place to find answers on a range of Fortinet products from peers and product experts.
sarif
New Contributor II

What function of VPN Concentrator?

Hi everyone... I have confuse about vpn concentrator, anybody help me to describe what is vpn concentrator mean? Thanks
5 REPLIES 5
emnoc
Esteemed Contributor III

VPN concentrator is a fancy way of saying vpn gateway device. Typically it' s used to reference a device that concentrator multiple vpn users or tunnels. You can also refer to it as vpn firewall device.

PCNSE 

NSE 

StrongSwan  

PCNSE NSE StrongSwan
davidolea
New Contributor

VPN concetrator give you the option to create a hub and spoke VPN, used mainly in some distributed topologys, where you need to centralize resources and access them by a secure connection.

-- David Olea FSE6

-- David Olea FSE6
Istvan_Takacs_FTNT

...or a simple SSL VPN connection. Basically if you enable VPN (IPsec or SSL VPN) on your Fortigate, than you can be a proud owner of an advanced VPN concentrator.
ede_pfau
SuperUser
SuperUser

David is right - VPN concentrator in the context of FortiOS denotes the central element of a hub-and-spoke VPN where multiple remote sites are connected to a central hub (usually the HQ). Every other meaning is not wrong but somebody else' s marketing...
Ede Kernel panic: Aiee, killing interrupt handler!
Ede Kernel panic: Aiee, killing interrupt handler!
DannyM

In FortiOS 5.4 this comes back as a setting in the GUI.

According to the Manual:

Concentrator

In a hub-and-spoke configuration, policy-based VPN connections to a number of remote peers radiate from a single, central FortiGate unit. Site-to-site connections between the remote peers do not exist; however, you can establish VPN tunnels between any two of the remote peers through the FortiGate unit’s “hub”. In a hub-and-spoke network, all VPN tunnels terminate at the hub. The peers that connect to the hub are known as “spokes”. The hub functions as a concentrator on the network, managing all VPN connections between the spokes. VPN traffic passes from one tunnel to the other through the hub. You define a concentrator to include spokes in the hub-and-spoke configuration. You create the concentrator in VPN > IPsec Concentrator and select Create New. A concentrator configuration specifies which spokes to include in an IPsec hub-and-spoke configuration.

 

Settings: Concentrator Name: Type a name for the concentrator.

Available Tunnels: A list of defined IPsec VPN tunnels. Select a tunnel from the list and then select the right arrow.

Members: A list of tunnels that are members of the concentrator. To remove a tunnel from the concentrator, select the tunnel and select the left arrow.

Announcements

Select Forum Responses to become Knowledge Articles!

Select the “Nominate to Knowledge Base” button to recommend a forum post to become a knowledge article.

Labels
Top Kudoed Authors