I have an Azure Cloud Service, mywebapp.cloudapp.net, that consists of two Azure VMs - mywebappvm1 and mywebappvm2. Both VMs are in the same Availability Set and have the same DNS name.
I also have a Regional Reserved IP address assigned to the Cloud Service so that I can give our clients a guaranteed IP address that our app uses.
Part of the app uses a private background process, currently only running on one of the VMs. I want to be able to make a connection to that process over TCP running on mywebappvm1 from mywebappvm2. I could use the public IP and an endpoint on mywebappvm1 but I don't want the background service to be publicly accessible.
I'm currently using the private IP address, but is that safe? Will the private IP of each VM change if it's rebooted? I can't see an easy way of fixing the private IP of each VM - that seems like something you can do with a VNET but I can't find any information on how to do it with a cloud service and an availability group as well.
Is there perhaps another way to run a web app on multiple load-balanced VMs within an availability set that would make this easier?
What you do is absolutely safe and actually a recommended best practice. You should not go out to public IP address in order to communicate between the Virtual Machines.
It is also a recommended best practice to organize your Virtual Machines into Virtual Network and sub-nets.
This excellent blog post describes how can you even use static IP addresses for the VMs, so you are always 100% sure that mywebappvm1 always get XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX IP Address andyour mywebappvm2 always get YYY.YYY.YYY.YYY IP Address.
Please note that if you do not use Static IP Address assigned to the VM, it is guaranteed that the IP Address of the VM may change.
The IP for a webRole VM instance will not change for the lifetime of the deployment regardless of reboot, update or swapping. The IP will be released only if you delete the deployment, detailed here
Related
I had a need to add additional public IP addresses to an Azure VM and found a working solution here:
Azure VM: More than one Public IP
Essentially this creates a reserved IP in Azure and then adds the reserved IP to a cloud service. Once it's bound to a cloud service it can be mapped to a VM endpoint.
This all works great but there is one bit I don't understand - The IP address of the reserved IP and the resultant VM endpoint don't match. I have to set up DNS to point to the IP address of the endpoint to make this work. Is there something I am not doing right, or is this just the way reserved VMs work?
It looks like this unanswered question is the same issue:
azure reserved IP for VM is diffrent than the given
Thanks!
The "Azure Cloud Service" is a container that provides internet connectivity to "Azure VMs". Thus, you assign the Internet facing Public IP to the Cloud Service. This article is relatively good at explaining the relationship: Azure Cloud Services
From above link:
Here’s a definition of an Azure IaaS cloud service that will make it easy for you to understand what it is in the context of Azure Infrastructure Services:
A cloud service is a network container where you can place virtual machines.
All virtual machines in that container can communicate with each other directly through Azure (and therefore don’t have to go out to the Internet to communicate with each other).
This container is also assigned a DNS name that is reachable from the Internet.
A rudimentary DNS server is created and can provide name resolution for all virtual machines within the same cloud service container (note that name resolution provided by the DNS server is only available to the virtual machines that are located within the cloud service).
One or more Virtual IP Addresses (VIPs) are assigned to the container and these IP addresses can be used to allow inbound connections from the Internet to the virtual machines.
Certain services (like FTP) may require your vm have a public IP: Azure VM Public IP
(IaaS v1) An Azure cloud service comes with a permanent DNS name - something.cloudapp.net - and has a single VIP allocated whenever there are VMs deployed in it OR whenever a reserved IP address is associated with it. Traffic is either load balanced or NATted (port forwarded) to the VM from the Azure Load Balancer sitting on the VIP. You can also associate a public instance-level IP address (PIP) with a VM, which gives it an additional IP address. The VIP always has a DNS name (something.cloudapp.net) while the PIP has one only if you specifically add it, I did a post which goes into these differences.
(IaaS v2) VMs are not deployed into cloud services and only have a public IP address if one is specifically added - either by configuring a PIP on the NIC of the VM (and optionally giving it a cloudapp.azure.com DNS name) or by configuring a load balancer and either load balancing or NATting traffic to it. This load balancer is configured with a public IP address and can optionally have a cloudapp.azure.com DNS name associated with it. (Ignoring internal load balancers in this discussion.)
we need to access our partner's sql azure db, they ask for an ip so they add to the whitelist, thing is we doing the dev work on our azure vm (under different subscription), what ip should we give them, I suppose a public IP address? Will that change over time?
Thanks advance for the help!
Your VM public IP will not change unless all the VMs in that cloud service (the service holding the public IP) are stop/deallocated. Restarting the VM won't change the IP either.
I usually shutdown my VM very carefully to prevent accidentally changing my IP addresses. So far for past few years, I just tried once unintended change.
Note:
You may also consider the newly introduced Reserved IP to reserve an IP and prevent it from changing. However,
[a]t this time, you can’t reserve an IP address for a cloud service
that you have already created.
which means you could only reserve a new IP address if you would like to use Reserved IP.
I want to have three public ip addresses for my VM in azure. I got one when I created the VM and now I want to assign two reserved ip addresses to my VM. I was able to create the reserved ip address but not sure how to assign them to existing VM or assign multiple to a new VM. Any suggestions on how to do this?
In Azure, a Load Balancer is required in order to direct traffic from multiple VIP addresses to a single (or multiple) VMs.
If, for example, you want a single VM to host multiple websites, all of which need to be accessible externally via port 443, you'd need three VIP addresses assigned to the Load Balancer, with a NAT on each at least two of the VIPs; i.e.
Site a: Incoming 443-443 to VM
Site b: Incoming 443-444 to VM
Site c: Incoming 443-445 to VM
All the traffic from the Load Balancer could then be routed to one VM, where you'd direct traffic on each incoming port to the required website based. This MS article explains it really well: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/load-balancer-multivip/
Reserved IP addresses are a way of ensuring that your VIP is no longer dynamic, which they are by default. The following article explains it well, including how to take an existing Cloud Service's currently-running dynamic VIP and making it static (Reserved): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-reserved-public-ip/
An Azure VM can have two public IP addresses - one is the VIP of the cloud service containing the VM (as long as there are endpoints configured for the VM) and the other is the PIP (or public instance IP address) associated with the VM. A reserved IP address is an orthogonal concept to VIPs and PIPs and its use is documented here. I did a post on VIPs, DIPs and PIPs that you may find helpful.
I created 2 vms, one for centos and another one for azure, I used the same cloud service, but both have the same public IP Address, why>? can I change it?
Or they have to be in different separate cloud services?
By default, they are behind a single IP address which load balances the private IP addresses. Until recently, there was no way to get a public IP for a virtual machine.
Now, it's possible to assign a public IP to a virtual machine:
With Instance-level Public IPs for VMs, you can now assign public IP addresses to your virtual machines, so they become directly addressable without having to map an endpoint through a VIP. This feature will enable scenarios like easily running FTP servers in Azure and monitoring virtual machines directly using their IPs.
We are making this new capability available in preview form today. This feature is available only with new deployments and new virtual networks and can be enabled via PowerShell.
Typically, the load balancer is fine, but there are options if you absolutely need access to individual machines.
Since they're in the same cloud service, they're probably behind the same load balancer, and a load balancer would only have one public IP.
So, yes, I would use different cloud services as you mentioned.
Background. I have a service that is crawling a partners website. Their website blocks "bot like" behaviour by IP Address. They don't control their servers themselves, so they want me to change IP address of my crawler often (e.g. every minute). The crawler is currently running as an Azure Cloud Service.
So my question is. How would you programmatically change the IP address of an Azure server?
I could use a Proxy... but the site is running on SSL, so I'm not sure this is an option.
I could use a VPN connection... but I'm not sure if it's possible to programmatically dial a VPN from within a Cloud Service/VM? I'm using C#/.NET.
Finally. I tried to do a VIP Swap, which actually gives me a new IP in seconds. But unfortunately this only works when swapping form Staging to Production. I get an error when trying to swap from Production to Staging, if there is no staging running. Why is this blocked?
You cannot programmatically change a deployment's IP address, aside from shutting down the deployment (which releases the IP address) and then re-starting it (and that you can do programmatically, or through PowerShell). Also note that if you have several Virtual Machines in the same deployment, each VM will share the same public IP address.
Note that with Virtual Machines (vs. web/worker role cloud services), if you have a single Virtual Machine, you can stop the VM, then restart it, and you'll get a new IP address (ok, actually, there's no guarantee you'll get a different IP address, so more accurately you'll be assigned an IP address) while retaining the state of your VM. Shutdown and startup are not an instantaneous operatios however, and it's not going to provide you a per-minute IP address (and your VM will end up being offline shutting down or starting up pretty much all the time), so it won't satisfy your requirement.