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VPN Gateway:Get started with IPsec-VPN (VPN gateway)

Last Updated:Feb 26, 2026

IPsec-VPN lets you create an encrypted tunnel between your on-premises data center and an Alibaba Cloud VPC. This guide walks you through the end-to-end setup when the IPsec-VPN connection is associated with a VPN gateway.

Alibaba Cloud IPsec-VPN supports two deployment modes:

  • Dual-tunnel mode — Two tunnels for high availability. If one tunnel goes down, traffic automatically fails over to the other. Recommended for production workloads.

  • Single-tunnel mode — One tunnel. Simpler to set up, suitable for development or non-critical environments.

Before you begin

Make sure your environment meets the following requirements:

  • Your on-premises gateway device has a public IP address. Dual-tunnel mode works with a single public IP, but for higher availability you can optionally use two public IPs or two gateway devices. For supported regions, see Associate an IPsec-VPN connection with a VPN gateway.

  • Your on-premises gateway device supports IKEv1 or IKEv2.

  • The CIDR blocks of your data center and VPC do not overlap.

  • The security group rules on your ECS instances allow traffic from your on-premises gateway device. For more information, see Use security groups.

Workflow

Step

Action

Description

1

Create a VPN gateway

Create a VPN gateway with IPsec-VPN enabled.

2

Create a customer gateway

Register your on-premises gateway device on Alibaba Cloud by providing its public IP address and BGP ASN (if applicable).

3

Create an IPsec-VPN connection

Create an encrypted tunnel between your data center and VPC. Set Associate Resource to VPN Gateway.

4

Configure the gateway device in the data center

Add VPN configurations to your on-premises device so it can negotiate and establish the IPsec tunnel.

5

Configure a route for the VPN gateway

Add a route pointing to your data center and advertise it to the VPC route table.

6

Test connectivity

Log on to an ECS instance in the VPC and ping a private IP address in your data center.

Step-by-step tutorials

Follow one of these end-to-end tutorials based on your chosen deployment mode:

Dual-tunnel mode

Single-tunnel mode