- Groups & manages public + private IP.
- The address for each NIC are within the same subnet.
- Associations:
- A VM must have at least one network interface attached to it.
- It can have network security group associated with it.
- It has a VNet and subnet associated with it.
- 💡 Adding an virtual network interface does not cause any downtime.
- Best practice recommended by Microsoft.
- Needed for many network virtual appliances.
- 💡 Having different front-end and back-end NIC(s) makes administration/management easier
- Primary NIC is first NIC attached, secondary NIC(s) are the others.
- By default outbound traffic is sent by IP from primary NIC and Load Balancer pool uses primary NIC IP.
- ❗ Limitations
- VM size limits how many NICs can be attached.
- Only one NIC can have public IP.
- The order (names) of the NICs inside the VM will be random or can be changed after Azure updates etc, but IP and MAC addresses stay the same.
- In an availability set for each VM must use either multiple NICs or single.
- You cannot mix.
- Single NIC <=> Multiple NIC(s) configuration requires VM to be re-deployed.
- Prefix: e.g. 10.1.0.0/24
- ❗ Dynamic <=> static switch requires NIC to be restarted.
- Effects subnet configuration.
- Azure best practice is to manage subnets separately.
- Subnet for static IPs and subnet for dynamic IPs.
- E.g. in multi-tier application web servers and load balancers will have public IPs but internal web application data layers won't have public IPs.
- E.g. in big infrastructure where they have one or two jump boxes that have public IPs for the purpose of doing administration.
- A box you can RDP to and then from there access other systems inside the implementation versus giving everything a public IP.
- Default gateway is completely managed by Azure. You cannot modify.
- You can set custom DNS server.
- DNS server of VM is inherited from VNet, not IP address.
- Used for external internet communication.
- Azure ARM object with a globally unique name.
- Used in: • VMs • load balancer • VPN gateway • Application Gateway.
- Can be static or dynamic.
- Static IP do not change and is good for:
- DNS name resolution.
- IP address-based security
- SSL certificates linked to an IP
- Firewall rules
- Role-based VMs such as domain controllers and DNS servers
- Static IP do not change and is good for:
- 📝 SKUs
- Basic
- Can be assigned to any Azure resource
- Assigned to a zone and not zone redundant.
- Standard
- Always static.
- ❗ Can only be assigned to: NICs, public standard load balancers
- Zone redundant by default.
- Basic
- Used within VNet and subnets.
- Can be used on-premises with VPN gateway or ExpressRoute.
- Can be static or dynamic
- Resources: in VMs, Load balancers and Application gateway.
- Modifies IP address to reach right target.
- Allows transient flows. E.g. NIC3 lets a NIC1 trying to communicate with NIC2 that it has no route to but only to NIC3 by IP forwarding during routing.