Skip to main content

Define multiple networks (NIC) on Azure VMs

NIC comes from Network Interface Controller. What is connection between NIC and Microsoft Azure?
Starting from now we have the possibility to define multiple virtual network interfaces for each VM that is hosted on Azure. In on-premises this features is used to connect to multiple networks and provide mechanism to isolate different tiers of our system.
This can be used with success, in combination with a VPN connection to connect to multiple on-premises networks or Azure Virtual Networks. In this way we can establish a Cross Premises Connectivity.
In this moment the configuration can be made using PowerShell scripts and commands. An important pre requirement for NIC is to have Azure Virtual Network already configured on that VM.
A NIC can be configured only on VM. You cannot make this configuration on a web role or web sites. In this moment this feature is available only for VM. There is also a limit of number of NICs that you can define on each VM. The number is direct connected to the size of the machine. For example for an A6 you can define 2 NICs, but for an A7 you can define 4 NICS.
Because NICs are a new feature on Azure, there are some limitation in this moment. I expect that in the near future this limitation will be relaxed or even disappear. Below you can find a part of this limitations:
You cannot have multiple NICs on the same subnet
IP and MAC of each NIC will remain the same after a restart. The same thing is also for the network orders even if the order or networks cannot be controlled.
You cannot add/remove NICs once the VM is connected. This is one of the limitations that I hope that will be removed in near future.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Windows Docker Containers can make WIN32 API calls, use COM and ASP.NET WebForms

After the last post , I received two interesting questions related to Docker and Windows. People were interested if we do Win32 API calls from a Docker container and if there is support for COM. WIN32 Support To test calls to WIN32 API, let’s try to populate SYSTEM_INFO class. [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct SYSTEM_INFO { public uint dwOemId; public uint dwPageSize; public uint lpMinimumApplicationAddress; public uint lpMaximumApplicationAddress; public uint dwActiveProcessorMask; public uint dwNumberOfProcessors; public uint dwProcessorType; public uint dwAllocationGranularity; public uint dwProcessorLevel; public uint dwProcessorRevision; } ... [DllImport("kernel32")] static extern void GetSystemInfo(ref SYSTEM_INFO pSI); ... SYSTEM_INFO pSI = new SYSTEM_INFO(

Azure AD and AWS Cognito side-by-side

In the last few weeks, I was involved in multiple opportunities on Microsoft Azure and Amazon, where we had to analyse AWS Cognito, Azure AD and other solutions that are available on the market. I decided to consolidate in one post all features and differences that I identified for both of them that we should need to take into account. Take into account that Azure AD is an identity and access management services well integrated with Microsoft stack. In comparison, AWS Cognito is just a user sign-up, sign-in and access control and nothing more. The focus is not on the main features, is more on small things that can make a difference when you want to decide where we want to store and manage our users.  This information might be useful in the future when we need to decide where we want to keep and manage our users.  Feature Azure AD (B2C, B2C) AWS Cognito Access token lifetime Default 1h – the value is configurable 1h – cannot be modified

ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded

Today blog post will be started with the following error when running DB tests on the CI machine: threw exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The Entity Framework provider type 'System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DependencyResolution.ProviderServicesFactory.GetInstance(String providerTypeName, String providerInvariantName) This error happened only on the Continuous Integration machine. On the devs machines, everything has fine. The classic problem – on my machine it’s working. The CI has the following configuration: TeamCity .NET 4.51 EF 6.0.2 VS2013 It see