Overview
Five blocks on one screen, covering three genuinely different jobs. Knowing which block you want saves most of the confusion here.Navigation: Networking → VPC → click a VPC → VPN Connections.
Which block do you want?
All three need a VPN gateway on this VPC first.
Connect to another VPC
A banner offering Connect VPC, which opens the Fabric connection flow.The button relabels itself to Another Zone required when no eligible peer exists, and the guidance line above says what’s missing. Fabric links go between VPCs in different zones — two VPCs in the same zone are not eligible peers.
Managed Fabric connections
Links Fabric maintains for you — “Automated bidirectional VPN links managed by Networking → Fabric.”
Retry appears on failed links; disconnect on completed or failed ones.
Connecting is a normal intermediate state, not a fault. A Fabric link is two tunnels, one per side, and it reports Connecting until both come up. Give it a minute before retrying — a retry restarts the whole build.
Site-to-Site Connections
Manual tunnels to a network you run yourself. Add Connection asks for three things:
Row actions are Reset and Delete.
Passive means this side waits rather than initiating. Use it when the far end is behind NAT or has a dynamic address, so it must be the one to dial out. If both sides are passive the tunnel never comes up, which is a genuinely easy mistake to make and produces no error — just a tunnel that stays down.
Remote Access VPN
For individual people rather than site-to-site — “Give your team secure VPN access to this VPC’s private network from any device — no client software required.” Enable it by choosing a public IP. Once on you get:VPN Users
Accounts allowed to use remote access. Add with a Username and Password inline; remove with the delete icon on hover.VPN users are separate from console users. Deleting someone from Users does not remove their VPN access, and vice versa. Offboarding means both lists.
Worked example: give a new engineer access to private machines
1
Confirm the VPC has a VPN gateway
VPN Gateway. Remote access needs a public IP to terminate on.
2
Enable Remote Access VPN if it is off
Choose a public IP. Prefer one that isn’t doing anything else.
3
Add a VPN user for that person
Their own username. Set a real password — this pairs with a shared key, so the password is the only thing unique to them.
4
Send them the server address and their credentials
And the platform steps from How to connect. Send the pre-shared key separately from the password, over a different channel.
5
Check the firewall policy allows what they need
Remote access puts them on the private network; the tier’s firewall policy still decides what they can reach. A working VPN with nothing reachable behind it looks like a broken VPN.
6
Note the access in Comments
Who has VPN access and why, in Comments. Access nobody remembers granting is access nobody revokes.
Related
Fabric
Managed links between VPCs.
Customer Gateways
The far end of a site-to-site tunnel.
VPN Gateway
What all three kinds are built on.
Site-to-Site VPN
The account-wide view of tunnels.