How can I allow more than 5 users to VPN into my SBS 2008 or SBS 2011 Standard server?

By default when the VPN configuration for SBS 2008 and SBS 2011 Standard allows only 5 users to VPN at once.  This is often not enough for the larger network environments.  The question that comes is “How can I increase VPN to allow more than 5 users”.  Fortunately it’s pretty simple.

First up, start with configuring VPN via the SBS console.  To do that, go to the Network Tab and select the Connectivity sub tab.  Then run the “Configure a Virtual Private Network” wizard from the task pane on the right.

Select “Allow users to connect to the server by using a VPN” and the VPN wizard will run.

It will configure the Routing and Remote Access services to provide the VPN functionality and if your router has uPnP allowed, it will also configure port 1723 to pass through the router to the SBS server itself.

Now that you’ve configured the VPN, you may feel free to test it from outside your network so that you know it works right now.

In order to increase the number of available ports for your remote access / VPN users, you need to open the Routing and Remote Access console.  It’s under the Administrative Tools menu on the Start > Program menu

If you select the Ports node from the menu above, you will see it display that it’s already allocated the 5 ports that is the default for the SBS VPN wizard as you can see below.

Right select on the Ports node and then select Properties.  You should get the screen below showing you the number of ports defined for the various protocols.

Select the WAN Miniport (PPTP) entry and then select the Configure button at the bottom.

You can then change the number of ports to the maximum number of VPN users you will expect.  In the screen below, I’ve changed it to 20

Select OK on this screen and then OK again to take you back to the main Routing and Remote Access console.  You should see the number of ports has increased as the screen below shows.

Voila – you’ve done it – nothing more to do except sit back and enjoy the 20 users remotely accessing your network now.

Oh – one final word, if you even run the SBS VPN wizard again to disable and then enable VPN, it will reset the ports back to 5.

Tags: Remote Access, SBS 2008, SBS 2011, SBS 2011 Standard, VPN

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2012 at 9:00 pm and is filed under FAQs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.