About Virtual Tunnel Interfaces

Management Center supports a routable logical interface called the Virtual Tunnel Interface (VTI). VTIs do not require a static mapping of IPsec sessions to a physical interface. The IPsec tunnel endpoint is associated with a virtual interface. You can use these interfaces like other interfaces and apply static and dynamic routing policies.

As an alternative to policy-based VPN, you can create a VPN tunnel between peers using VTIs. VTIs support route-based VPN with IPsec profiles attached to the end of each tunnel. VTIs use static or dynamic routes. The device encrypts or decrypts the traffic from or to the tunnel interface and forwards it according to the routing table. Deployments become easier, and having VTI which supports route-based VPN with dynamic routing protocol also satisfies many requirements of a virtual private cloud. Management Center enables you to easily migrate from crypto-map based VPN configuration to VTI-based VPN.

You can configure route-based VPN with static or dynamic VTI using the site-to-site VPN wizard. Traffic is encrypted using static route, BGP, OSPFv2/v3, or EIGRP.

You can create a routed security zone, add VTI interfaces to it, and define access control rules for the decrypted traffic control over the VTI tunnel.

You can create VTI-based VPNs between:

  • Two threat defense devices.

  • A threat defense and public cloud.

  • One threat defense and another threat defense with service provider redundancy.

  • A threat defense and any other device with VTI interfaces.

  • A threat defense and another device with policy-based VPN configuration.

There are two types of VTI interfaces: static VTI and dynamic VTI.

For more information, see Static VTI and Dynamic VTI.