What's OpenVPN ?

[LoneWolf]

I define it as obscure in that very few commercial VPN products seem to use Open VPN. The vast majority of it's small market share is apparently custom hacked firmware and manual home installs.

VPN support in a 'home' product is rare fullstop.

You might be able to use Open VPN for a described small and presumably non business critical environment, but some of us work for enterprises, where having the only support option as post and pray to a forum or mailing list isn't an acceptable risk, and where features like automatic failover across multiple gateways that are relatively easily provided by IPSEC but less so SSL based VPNs are required.

Your middle sentence is the most accurate.

Several midrange products for business use OpenVPN as an option, though, even if it isn't their primary. I use WatchGuard firewalls, and OpenVPN can be configured to work with them just fine (though there are other options too). QNAP and Synology NAS products can use OpenVPN. Just because Cisco and Juniper don't support it doesn't mean that it doesn't have widespread support in the world; it just means there are two enterprise vendors who roll their own VPN setup, and it also means that you haven't used products that use it. Plenty of others have.

Finally, OpenVPN can work just fine in a business environment. Whether it's the choice you want vs. another client depends on what you're trying to do. One size certainly doesn't fit all.