V2Ray is a versatile proxy platform that has become essential for network engineers, site owners, and enterprise administrators aiming to implement granular traffic control and advanced bypass strategies. Its routing subsystem is one of the most powerful features, enabling selective proxying, load distribution, and policy enforcement based on IP, domain, port, and protocol characteristics. This article unpacks V2Ray routing with technical clarity, presents essential rule types and configuration patterns, and provides actionable guidance for real-world deployments.

Core Concepts: How V2Ray Routing Works

At a high level, V2Ray routing decides which outbound path a connection will take after being accepted by an inbound. Routing rules are processed sequentially until a match is found. Each rule evaluates multiple matchers and directs matching traffic to a named outbound, a balancer, or a blackhole. Understanding the following concepts is critical:

  • Tagging: Inbound and outbound entries have tags. Routing rules refer to outbound tags to determine where to send traffic.
  • Matchers: Conditions such as domain, ip, port, network, source, and protocol that evaluate packet metadata.
  • Routing policies: Organizations of rules under the routing.rules array. Rules are evaluated top-to-bottom.
  • Balancers: Weighted or failover groups of outbounds for load distribution and resilience.
  • Domain/IP lists: Offline or built-in lists (geosite, geoip) used to specify groups of domains or IP ranges.

Essential Rule Types and When to Use Them

Below are the most commonly used routing matchers and their intended use cases.

Domain-Based Routing

Domain matching is ideal for selecting traffic by hostname. V2Ray supports domain matchers with suffix, full, regex, and domain lists. Typical use cases:

  • Route all traffic to major services (e.g., cloud providers, CDN) through a specific outbound.
  • Split traffic for regional services using geosite categories (e.g., geosite:cn).

Example list usage (referenced in a rule): domain:geosite:google or domain:suffix:example.com. Official geosite collections are maintained and can be referenced; see the official repository for curated category names.

IP-Based Routing

IP matchers are used for more deterministic routing when domain information is insufficient (e.g., non-HTTP protocols, TLS SNI absent). IP rules match CIDR ranges or geoip categories. Common patterns:

  • Bypass local network ranges (LAN): match ip:private ranges to send them directly (or to a blackhole).
  • Route traffic destined for blocked country ranges via proxies: match geoip:CN or similar.

Port and Protocol Matching

When you need to treat services differently by port or protocol (TCP vs UDP), use the port and protocol matchers. For example, route DNS-over-UDP to a specific DNS resolver outbound, while routing HTTPS over TCP through the general proxy.

Source and User-Based Rules

In multi-tenant or gateway scenarios, the source matcher (source IP) is invaluable for enforcing policies per user or subnet. Aside from source IP, you can use inbound tags to segregate traffic and apply routing only for requests coming from specific inbounds.

Practical Configuration Patterns

The following patterns demonstrate how to assemble rules for typical deployment scenarios. While this section summarizes JSON-like logic, adapt syntax precisely to your V2Ray version and config file structure.

1. Default Bypass-LAN, Bypass-China, Proxy-Rest

A common pattern for Chinese-hosted servers that need to proxy non-China destinations while serving local traffic directly:

  • Rule 1: Match ip:private or local ports -> outbound direct (or blackhole)
  • Rule 2: Match geoip:CN -> outbound direct
  • Rule 3: Match domain:geosite:cn -> outbound direct
  • Rule 4: Match everything else -> outbound proxy

Why order matters: Specific allow/bypass rules must precede broad catch-all proxy rules. Otherwise, non-proxied traffic will be captured by the generic rule.

2. Split Tunnel for Corporate Apps

When certain SaaS or internal services must bypass the public proxy for compliance or latency reasons:

  • Create an inbound tag for the internal network or user
  • Define rules: domain:list or ip:cidr for corporate apps -> outbound direct
  • Other traffic -> outbound proxy

3. Multi-Outbounds and Failover Balancer

Use balancers to distribute traffic across multiple gateways or implement failover:

  • Create multiple outbounds (tags: gw1, gw2) pointing to different remote servers.
  • Define a balancer referencing those tags with weights/failover settings.
  • Route matching traffic to the balancer tag.

Balancers can perform active health checks; configure probe intervals and failure thresholds to avoid sending traffic to unhealthy endpoints.

Advanced Topics and Fine-Grained Controls

Sniffing and Protocol Detection

V2Ray can “sniff” flows to determine application protocols (e.g., HTTP, TLS) and extract hostnames or SNI. When enabled on an inbound:

  • Use sniffing results in routing decisions (domain from SNI for TLS flows).
  • Be cautious: sniffing on encrypted transports may be limited to cleartext SNI or ALPN headers, depending on the protocol.

Regular Expressions and Regex Domains

Regex domain matching provides powerful flexibility but is CPU costlier and should be used sparingly. Use regex to capture patterns that cannot be represented by suffix or full matches.

Timeouts, Connection Reuse, and Performance Considerations

Routing decisions can add negligible CPU cost, but complex regex lists and very large domain/ip lists can increase lookup times. Optimize by:

  • Preferring suffix and full domain matches over regex where possible.
  • Using compiled geosite/geoip files instead of huge custom lists when feasible.
  • Keeping rule count reasonable and ordering rules by frequency and specificity.

Troubleshooting and Testing Strategies

Troubleshooting routing issues typically involves isolating which rule matched a flow and validating outbound reachability.

  • Check logs: increase V2Ray log level to info or debug to see routing decisions and tag selections.
  • Temporarily insert debugging rules at the top that tag and route specific test domains to known outbounds.
  • Use packet captures and TLS SNI inspection to verify domain-based rules are receiving the expected hostname.
  • Test DNS resolution paths; ensure DNS routing or outbound used by the DNS request is consistent with your routing policy.

Security and Compliance Notes

When using V2Ray in corporate environments, ensure routing policies comply with security and data residency requirements:

  • Audit balancer and outbound endpoints; restrict their configuration changes to authorized administrators.
  • Use access controls and TLS on control channels to prevent configuration tampering.
  • Log and retain routing events for incident analysis, but be mindful of privacy and GDPR-like obligations.

Useful Resources

For authoritative geosite and geoip lists, refer to the official repositories and documentation. These lists are frequently updated and curated to reflect domain categorization and IP allocations. Example links:

Checklist for Production Deployments

  • Define a clear routing objective: bypass-first, proxy-first, or hybrid split-tunnel.
  • Use tags consistently for inbounds/outbounds and reference those tags in rules.
  • Place specific bypass rules above generic proxy rules.
  • Test with instrumentation: logs, health checks, and synthetic transactions.
  • Document rule rationale and maintain versioned configuration backups for rollbacks.

V2Ray routing provides fine-grained control that scales from a single server to enterprise-grade gateway clusters. The key to successful deployments is a thoughtful rule hierarchy, selective use of heavy matchers like regex, and robust testing. Implementing these practices will give site owners, developers, and enterprise administrators predictable, auditable traffic behavior while maximizing performance and reliability.

For additional guidance and deployment templates tailored to dedicated IP VPN scenarios, visit Dedicated-IP-VPN at https://dedicated-ip-vpn.com/.