Site to Site VPN Performance

[acv3gas]

I'm setting up a new remote office where I would like a few PCs connected back to our head office SBS 2008 server. We've got a reasonable ADSL connection at our Head Office and I'm hoping (getting installed this week) at our new remote location too.
I've been doing some testing this week between the Head office and my home office where I have a reasonable ADSL connection but not great.
I have set-up a PPTP/MPPE LAN to LAN VPN connection and have a domain PC connected from home but the performance is not great. I'm just trying to figure out whether this is down to my less than stellar home ADSL connection or whether better hardware could improve the situation.
I'm using 2x 'DrayTek Vigor2830n Plus' which I have now found does not fair well in snb's VPN throughput tests, could this be the reason for the poor performance?
I have tried removing the encryption and using just PPTP which is suppose to offer the best performance but I didn't notice too much improvement and obviously this wouldn't be an ideal choice for the future.

Any comments welcome. Buying new hardware shouldn't be a problem just want to ensure it is going to pay us back in performance.

 

[thiggins]

Limiting factors for VPN throughput are VPN gateway (in this case your Drayteks) throughput and, of course, your Internet connection bandwidth.

 

[acv3gas]

From your tests though; what performance do you think I should be able to expect from the Draytek units? As I am limited by the ADSL Up/Down speed do you think a more expensive/higher throughput rated pair of routers would be able to achieve better performance?

 

[thiggins]

I don't know what your Internet speed is. The 2830n test results are here.

 

[acv3gas]

The Head Office: 12.4Mbps Down and 0.83Mbps Up
Home Office: 7Mbps Down and 0.4Mbps Up
New Office: Not sure yet

 

[thiggins]

Your limit is the uplink speeds. No router is going to change that.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

"A chain is only as strong as its weakest link".....uplink will hurt. When you're home....and you open/download things from the server...you are relying on the uplink of the connection that feeds the office where the server is.... just under 1 meg. Add to that...overhead from the VPN tunnel encryption, add to that...if you have netbios enabled in the tunnel (which clogs it up). And yes different VPN routers...different processors, different performance of VPN tunnels. Your home location..especially your workstation, should be using the DNS of your SBS box for properly logging into its active directory.