Implement Intersite Connectivity

Your company has offices in three different locations, and the data center of these offices are connected via mesh wide area network links, with full connectivity between them. Let's see how to reflect this environment in Azure.

Provision the environment

You will deploy three virtual machines, each into a separate virtual network, with two of them in the same Azure region and the third one in another Azure region.

1. In the Azure portal, open the Azure Cloud Shell by clicking on the icon in the top right of the Azure Portal.

2. If prompted to select either Bash or PowerShell, select PowerShell.

Note: If this is the first time you are starting Cloud Shell and you are presented with the You have no storage mounted message, select the subscription you are using, and click Create storage.

3. In the toolbar of the Cloud Shell pane, click the Upload/Download files icon, in the drop-down menu, click Upload and upload your template and parameters json into the Cloud Shell home directory.

4. From the Cloud Shell pane, run the following to create the resource group that will be hosting the lab environment. The first two virtual networks and a pair of virtual machines will be deployed in [Azure_region_1]. The third virtual network and the third virtual machine will be deployed in the same resource group but another [Azure_region_2]. (replace the [Azure_region_1] and [Azure_region_2] placeholder, including the square brackets, with the names of two different Azure regions where you intend to deploy these Azure virtual machines. An example is $location1 = ‘eastus’. You can use Get-AzLocation to list all locations.):

$location1 = 'eastus'

$location2 = 'westus'

$rgName = 'az104-05-rg1'

New-AzResourceGroup -Name $rgName -Location $location1        

Note: The regions used above were tested and known to work when this lab was last officially reviewed by Microsoft. If you would prefer to use different locations, or they no longer work, you will need to identify two different regions that Standard D2Sv3 virtual machines can be deployed into.

In order to identify Azure regions, from a PowerShell session in Cloud Shell, run (Get-AzLocation).Location

Once you have identified two regions you would like to use, run the command below in the Cloud Shell for each region to confirm that you can deploy Standard D2Sv3 virtual machines.

az vm list-skus --location <Replace with your location> -o table --query "[? contains(name,'Standard_D2s')].name"        

If the command returns no results, then you need to choose another region. Once you have identified two suitable regions, you can adjust the regions in the code block above.

5. From the Cloud Shell pane, run the following to create the three virtual networks and deploy virtual machines into them by using the template and parameter files you uploaded:

Note: You will be prompted to provide an Admin password. 

New-AzResourceGroupDeployment `
   -ResourceGroupName $rgName `
   -TemplateFile $HOME/az104-05-vnetvm-loop-template.json `
   -TemplateParameterFile $HOME/az104-05-vnetvm-loop-parameters.json `
   -location1 $location1 `
   -location2 $location2        

Note: Wait for the deployment to complete before proceeding to the next step. This should take about 2 minutes.

6. Close the Cloud Shell pane. 

Configure local and global virtual network peering

Now, you will configure local and global peering between the virtual networks you deployed in the previous tasks.

1. In the Azure portal, search for and select Virtual networks.

2. Review the virtual networks you created in the previous task and verify that the first two are located in the same Azure region and the third one in a different Azure region.

Note: Ensure that the template you use to implement the three virtual networks does not overlap the IP address ranges of the three virtual networks.

3. In the list of virtual networks, click the vNet you created, in our example, az104-05-vnet0.

4. On the az104-05-vnet0 virtual network blade, in the Settings section, click Peerings and then click + Add.

5. Add a peering with the settings below, leave others with their default values and click Add.

Note: This step establishes two local peerings - one from az104-05-vnet0 to az104-05-vnet1 and the other from az104-05-vnet1 to az104-05-vnet0.

Note: In case you run into an issue with the Azure portal interface not displaying the virtual networks created in the previous task, you can configure peering by running the following PowerShell commands from Cloud Shell:

$rgName = 'az104-05-rg1'

$vnet0 = Get-AzVirtualNetwork -Name 'az104-05-vnet0' -ResourceGroupName $rgname

$vnet1 = Get-AzVirtualNetwork -Name 'az104-05-vnet1' -ResourceGroupName $rgname

Add-AzVirtualNetworkPeering -Name 'az104-05-vnet0_to_az104-05-vnet1' -VirtualNetwork $vnet0 -RemoteVirtualNetworkId $vnet1.Id

Add-AzVirtualNetworkPeering -Name 'az104-05-vnet1_to_az104-05-vnet0' -VirtualNetwork $vnet1 -RemoteVirtualNetworkId $vnet0.Id        

6. On the az104-05-vnet0 virtual network blade, in the Settings section, click Peerings and then click + Add.

7. Add a peering with the settings below, leave others with their default values and click Add.

Note: This step establishes two global peerings - one from az104-05-vnet0 to az104-05-vnet2 and the other from az104-05-vnet2 to az104-05-vnet0.

Note: In case you run into an issue with the Azure portal interface not displaying the virtual networks created in the previous task, you can configure peering by running the following PowerShell commands from Cloud Shell:

$rgName = 'az104-05-rg1'

$vnet0 = Get-AzVirtualNetwork -Name 'az104-05-vnet0' -ResourceGroupName $rgname

$vnet2 = Get-AzVirtualNetwork -Name 'az104-05-vnet2' -ResourceGroupName $rgname

Add-AzVirtualNetworkPeering -Name 'az104-05-vnet0_to_az104-05-vnet2' -VirtualNetwork $vnet0 -RemoteVirtualNetworkId $vnet2.Id

Add-AzVirtualNetworkPeering -Name 'az104-05-vnet2_to_az104-05-vnet0' -VirtualNetwork $vnet2 -RemoteVirtualNetworkId $vnet0.Id        

8. Navigate back to the Virtual networks blade and, in the list of virtual networks, click az104-05-vnet1.

9. On the az104-05-vnet1 virtual network blade, in the Settings section, click Peerings and then click + Add.

10. Add a peering with the settings below, leave others with their default values and click Add.

Note: This step establishes two global peerings - one from az104-05-vnet1 to az104-05-vnet2 and the other from az104-05-vnet2 to az104-05-vnet1.

Note: In case you run into an issue with the Azure portal interface not displaying the virtual networks created in the previous task, you can configure peering by running the following PowerShell commands from Cloud Shell:

$rgName = 'az104-05-rg1'

$vnet1 = Get-AzVirtualNetwork -Name 'az104-05-vnet1' -ResourceGroupName $rgname

$vnet2 = Get-AzVirtualNetwork -Name 'az104-05-vnet2' -ResourceGroupName $rgname

Add-AzVirtualNetworkPeering -Name 'az104-05-vnet1_to_az104-05-vnet2' -VirtualNetwork $vnet1 -RemoteVirtualNetworkId $vnet2.Id

Add-AzVirtualNetworkPeering -Name 'az104-05-vnet2_to_az104-05-vnet1' -VirtualNetwork $vnet2 -RemoteVirtualNetworkId $vnet1.Id        

 Test intersite connectivity

With all created, we will test connectivity between virtual machines on the three virtual networks that we connected via local and global peering in the previous task.

1. In the Azure portal, search for and select Virtual machines.

2. In the list of virtual machines, click az104-05-vm0.

3. On the az104-05-vm0 blade, click Connect. In RDP, click Download RDP File and follow the prompts to start the Remote Desktop session.

Note: This step refers to connecting via Remote Desktop from a Windows computer. On a Mac, you can use Remote Desktop Client from the Mac App Store and on Linux computers you can use an open source RDP client software.

Note: You can ignore any warning prompts when connecting to the target virtual machines.

4. When prompted, sign in by using the Student username and the password from your parameters file.

5. Within the Remote Desktop session to az104-05-vm0, right-click the Start button and, in the right-click menu, click Windows PowerShell (Admin).

6. In the Windows PowerShell console window, run the following to test connectivity to az104-05-vm1 (which has the private IP address of 10.51.0.4) over TCP port 3389:

Test-NetConnection -ComputerName 10.51.0.4 -Port 3389 -InformationLevel 'Detailed'        

Note: The test uses TCP 3389 since this port is allowed by default by operating system firewall.

7. Examine the output of the command and verify that the connection was successful.

8. In the Windows PowerShell console window, run the following to test connectivity to az104-05-vm2 (which has the private IP address of 10.52.0.4):

Test-NetConnection -ComputerName 10.52.0.4 -Port 3389 -InformationLevel 'Detailed'        

9. Switch back to the Azure portal on your lab computer and navigate back to the Virtual machines blade.

10. In the list of virtual machines, click az104-05-vm1.

11. On the az104-05-vm1 blade, click Connect. In RDP, click Download RDP File and follow the prompts to start the Remote Desktop session.

Note: This step refers to connecting via Remote Desktop from a Windows computer. On a Mac, you can use Remote Desktop Client from the Mac App Store and on Linux computers you can use an open source RDP client software.

Note: You can ignore any warning prompts when connecting to the target virtual machines.

12. When prompted, sign in by using the Student username and the password from your parameters file.

13. Within the Remote Desktop session to az104-05-vm1, right-click the Start button and, in the right-click menu, click Windows PowerShell (Admin).

14. In the Windows PowerShell console window, run the following to test connectivity to az104-05-vm2 (which has the private IP address of 10.52.0.4) over TCP port 3389:

Test-NetConnection -ComputerName 10.52.0.4 -Port 3389 -InformationLevel 'Detailed'        

Note: The test uses TCP 3389 since this port is allowed by default by operating system firewall.

15. Examine the output of the command and verify that the connection was successful.