Azure VNet Connectivity

Introduction

Azure Virtual Network (Azure VNet) is a network or environment that can be used to run virtual machines and applications in the Azure cloud. Whenever an Azure Virtual Network is created, the services and some virtual machines within that Azure Network will interact with each other securely.

Azure VNet Connectivity

Azure VNet Connectivity is important because we as corporate companies may have a bunch of virtual machines running on different resources. There should be a way to establish connectivity among those virtual machines to ease communication among them.

This concept introduces the concept of Azure VNet Connectivity, which can be used to enable communication between workloads in various virtual networks.
There are mainly three various ways to do this. They are:

• Peering
• Global Peering
• VPN GateWay

Peering

Peering is a somewhat familiar term giving us a meaning neighbor or co-worker. Actually, this technique by its name says that it is used to connect two Virtual Networks in the same or across regions. Peering is basically used when both VNets are available in Azure and in the same region.

Features of Peering

- > Peering between two VNets will route the traffic between them directly from Microsoft backbone infrastructure.

- > Through Peering, we can establish hub-and-spoke networks, where the hub networks can able to host infrastructure components.

- > And each spoke virtual network could then peer with the hub network so that the traffic can easily flow through network appliances or VPN gateways within the virtual hub network.

- > Using peering, we can also configure the VPN gateway in the peered network as a transit point to an on-premises network.

Global Peering

Global Peering is used when we have a virtual network in Azure, but they exist in different regions. Here, for both peering and global peering - Gateway transit is supported.

Site-to-Site VPN

To connect Virtual Networks in Azure, where one virtual network is on-premises, and other virtual networks are present in other cloud providers, we need to use a Site-to-Site VPN.

Express Route

This is a somewhat different technique, where we will use Express Route if we have VNets on-premises data center, and those VNets should be on a private channel of communication.

VPN Gateway

VPN Gateway is one of the specific types of virtual network gateway that is used to send encrypted data between an Azure VNet and an on-premises location over the public internet. It can act as a middle man on both sides of the VNets. And the workloads that need to be communicated will communicate using this encrypted channel between the VPN gateways of both virtual networks. In order to deploy a VPN gateway into Azure, we need to configure settings related to:

- > Gateway SKUs: select SKUs based on the types of workloads, throughputs, features, and SLAs.

- > Connection types: It can be IPsec, Vnet2Vnet, ExpressRoute, or VPNClient.

- >  VPN Types: select VPN depending on the connection topology.

- > Gateway subnet: we need to create a gateway subnet “GatewaySubnet”.

- > Connection topologies: Site to Site, Multi-site, point-to-point, express route, and Vnet-to-Vnet.

- > Monitoring and Alerts: Monitors the key metrics and configure alerts.