One of the things I’ve been finding very confusing is the VPN Gateway sizing. Especially the mismatch between the pricing table and what the systems show you. Here’s the technical information:

Source: Azure.com: About VPN Gateways The same table is more or less available on the pricing page as well. There you can clearly see that the price difference is real. Pricing goes from 0,0304€ over 0,1603€ to 0,4133€/GW hour. As a VPN Gateway runs 24/7 this might have an impact on your bill. Pricing Source From a technical point of view both basic and standard offer the same features/performance for NON Express Route VPNs.

Conclusion #1: If you don’t need Express Route, there’s no difference between Standard and Basic.

Now what was bothering me: in many blogs/documentation people explain how to change the Gateway SKU. They always mention Default or HighPerformance. When you create a Gateway from the “old” portal this is how the resulting Gateway looks in PowerShell:

As you can see the GatewaySKU is Default. Now it might be just me, but how the hell on earth are we supposed to know what value default is? Luckily there’s a place like Azure Advisors on Yammer where get to ask questions like this. The Microsoft PM’s do a great job of helping is out and gathering feedback on various topics. The answer I got there is: Default is the same as Basic. Which does make sense in a way as we initially had either Basic or HighPerformance. But it does suck a bit that instead of using a default value they are setting default as a value. If you catch my drift…

Here’s the PowerShell cmdlet reference for the New-AzureVNetGateway cmdlet There you can see that the PowerShell cmdlet takes Basic, Standard and HighPerformance as parameters for the GatewaySKU parameter.

Conclusion #2: Default SKU == Basic SKU

Another area that might confuse you is how the new Portal displays the Gateway sizes. For all types (basic, standard and high performance) a size of Small is shown. Lucian also mentions this on his blog: blog.kloud.com: Azure VNET gateway: basic, standard and high performance But I must admit that I haven’t looked into this. I primarily cared about sku vs pricing.