Step-By-Step: Azure Virtual Network Peering

Hello Folks,

It feels like I’ve been covering this topic over and over.  Well, I have… 

However, the engineering team has been doing a tremendous job at enhancing the capabilities of virtual networking in Azure.  Today we’ll look at vnet peering.

VNet peering is a way to connects two virtual networks in the same region (that is key) through the Azure backbone network. Peered vnets appear as one for all connectivity purposes but virtual machines in these virtual networks can communicate with each other directly by using private IP addresses and the traffic between peered vnets is routed through the Azure infrastructure.

Here are some of the benefits of using VNet peering:

  • A low-latency, high-bandwidth connection between resources in different virtual networks.
  • The ability to use resources such as network appliances and VPN gateways as transit points in a peered VNet.
  • The ability to connect a virtual network that uses the Azure Resource Manager model to a virtual network that uses the classic deployment model and enable full connectivity between resources in these virtual networks.

before we start please ensure that you comply the the following requirements:

  • Your Vnets HAVE to be in the same region.
  • The IP addresses in your vnets must not overlap
  • keep in mind that these are NOT transitive routes

 

Step 1: Register the Vnet Peering provider

First of all we need to login our Azure Subscription

 

 #Connect to your account
Login-AzureRmAccount

VNet Peering is in public preview, to be able to use it you must register using the below.

 #Register Microsoft.Network provider

Register-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName AllowVnetPeering -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Network

Register-AzureRmResourceProvider -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Network

Step 2: Peer the Vnets

now that the provider is registered we can peer our networks.  we will use the following pre-created vnets

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First we need to read the vnet objects and store that in variables.  those objects will be used to create the peering.

 # read vnets objects
$vnet1 = Get-AzureRmVirtualNetwork -ResourceGroupName rg-client-east1 -Name vnet-client-east1
$vnet2 = Get-AzureRmVirtualNetwork -ResourceGroupName rg-client-east2 -Name vnet-client-east2

Second, we will create links between our vnets.  One in each direction.

 #creating the links between vnets. One per direction (Vnet1 --> Vnet2, Vnet2 --> Vnet1)
Add-AzureRmVirtualNetworkPeering -name LinkToVNet2 -VirtualNetwork $vnet1 -RemoteVirtualNetworkId $vnet2.id
Add-AzureRmVirtualNetworkPeering -name LinkToVNet1 -VirtualNetwork $vnet2 -RemoteVirtualNetworkId $vnet1.id 

after each command verify in the output that the provisioning was successful.

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You’ll notice above that some of the functionality is turned off or set to false/null.  there are some configurable settings for the PowerShell command.and we will take a look at them in an upcoming post.

image

Now that our command is complete our networks are now connected without the need for VPN Gateways

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Cheers!

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Pierre Roman
@pierreroman