Azure Reserved IP Address Inconsistency

Question

I had a need to add additional public IP addresses to an Azure VM and found a working solution here: Azure VM: More than one Public IP

Essentially this creates a reserved IP in Azure and then adds the reserved IP to a cloud service. Once it's bound to a cloud service it can be mapped to a VM endpoint.

This all works great but there is one bit I don't understand - The IP address of the reserved IP and the resultant VM endpoint don't match. I have to set up DNS to point to the IP address of the endpoint to make this work. Is there something I am not doing right, or is this just the way reserved VMs work?

It looks like this unanswered question is the same issue:

azure reserved IP for VM is diffrent than the given

Thanks!

Answer 1

The "Azure Cloud Service" is a container that provides internet connectivity to "Azure VMs". Thus, you assign the Internet facing Public IP to the Cloud Service. This article is relatively good at explaining the relationship: Azure Cloud Services

From above link:

Here’s a definition of an Azure IaaS cloud service that will make it easy for you to understand what it is in the context of Azure Infrastructure Services:

• A cloud service is a network container where you can place virtual machines.
• All virtual machines in that container can communicate with each other directly through Azure (and therefore don’t have to go out to the Internet to communicate with each other).
• This container is also assigned a DNS name that is reachable from the Internet.
• A rudimentary DNS server is created and can provide name resolution for all virtual machines within the same cloud service container (note that name resolution provided by the DNS server is only available to the virtual machines that are located within the cloud service).
• One or more Virtual IP Addresses (VIPs) are assigned to the container and these IP addresses can be used to allow inbound connections from the Internet to the virtual machines.

Certain services (like FTP) may require your vm have a public IP: Azure VM Public IP

Answer 2

(IaaS v1) An Azure cloud service comes with a permanent DNS name - something.cloudapp.net - and has a single VIP allocated whenever there are VMs deployed in it OR whenever a reserved IP address is associated with it. Traffic is either load balanced or NATted (port forwarded) to the VM from the Azure Load Balancer sitting on the VIP. You can also associate a public instance-level IP address (PIP) with a VM, which gives it an additional IP address. The VIP always has a DNS name (something.cloudapp.net) while the PIP has one only if you specifically add it, I did a post which goes into these differences.

(IaaS v2) VMs are not deployed into cloud services and only have a public IP address if one is specifically added - either by configuring a PIP on the NIC of the VM (and optionally giving it a cloudapp.azure.com DNS name) or by configuring a load balancer and either load balancing or NATting traffic to it. This load balancer is configured with a public IP address and can optionally have a cloudapp.azure.com DNS name associated with it. (Ignoring internal load balancers in this discussion.)