classic

VNET Peering – When to use and when not to use

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VNET Peering has been an available feature for almost a year now and has proved to be a very useful, popular, and for a long time the most requested feature. That said, as much as we would like to mesh together all our Azure VNETs into one lovely firewalled network topology, this isn’t always possible or suitable.

The situations whereby VNET peering (or it’s associated features) cannot be used are as follows:

  • VNETs in different regions cannot have a peering relationship
  • VNETs with overlapping address spaces cannot be peered
  • VNETs which are both created using the Classic Deployment model cannot be peered
  • VNETs which are created using mixed deployment models cannot be peered across different subscriptions (although this will be available in the future)
  • Both VNETs must be created using the Resource Manager Deployment Model for Gateway Chaining (using a gateway in a peered VNET) to function
  • There is a default limit of 10 VNET peers per VNET. This can be raised to a maximum of 50 using Azure Support requests

This still leaves many applicable situations whereby VNET peering can be very useful and can provide the hub and spoke, high speed, low latency network which your Azure subscription/s need.

 

Azure Classic to Resource Manager Migration – Validation failed

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I am starting to investigate the migration of resources from Azures Classic deployment mode into the shiny Azure Resource Manager mode.

The first step for me was to attempt to validate the VNET which I wanted to migrate to see if it was compatible. I ran the command listed on the following website (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-windows-ps-migration-classic-resource-manager/)

    Move-AzureVirtualNetwork -Validate -VirtualNetworkName $vnetName

As I expected (nothing is ever simple is it?!) I received an error as shown below. The problem was that the validationmessages shown was limited and didn’t really show me any detail. In my case all it showed me was the name of my VNET.

Validation failed.  Please see ValidationMessages for details

In order to get some more detailed information out of the cmdlet, I ended up saving the validation command to a variable and then calling the variable, as shown below:

$validate = Move-AzureVirtualNetwork -Validate -VirtualNetworkName $vnetName -Verbose

$validate.validationmessages

This gave me lots of detail and I discovered that I had typed the VNET name incorrectly. D’oh! I forgot that when you create a Classic VNET in the new portal, the actual name of the VNET is not what you see in the new portal. You need to have a look in the old manage.windowsazure.com portal to see the actual name.

Hopefully this helps some folk out there!