Microsoft announced earlier this year that we would have the ability to reserve the public IP address (virtual IP or VIP) of a cloud service in Azure. I’d love that:
- VIPs are non-reserved by default, so if your cloud service is suspended (maybe all VMs are shutdown) then you get a different VIP afterwards. That causes mayhem with traditional DNS.
- I’ve been using CNAMEs to resolve my domain name to the cloud service’s domain name to abstract the dynamic nature of VIPs. Unfortunately, compliant implementations of CNAME do not support machine names, e.g. www.aidanfinn.com.
What I needed was a reserved VIP. Every now and then I looked for the way to implement this new feature, but I only just found it now.
Fire up Azure PowerShell (make sure it’s up to date) and then log into your subscription using Add-AzureAccount.
Find your service name using Get-AzureService.
Then run the following cmdlet, substituting your choice of label for the VIP, region, and service name:
New-AzureReservedIP -ReservedIPName "MyVIP01" -Location "North Europe" -ServiceName “MyCloudService”
This cmdlet won’t change the VIP of the cloud service; instead it reserves the existing VIP on your cloud service, which is a non-disruptive action. You can query the results in the GUI or by running Get-AzureReservedIP:
To test, I shutdown all the VMs in the cloud service; this puts the cloud service into a suspended state. Normally the VIP is released when a cloud service is suspended. But when I started up the cloud service (starting 1 VM) the same VIP returned. Yay!
Keep in mind that there is a price plan for reserved VIP addresses. You get the first 5 reserved VIPs for free (subject to change). There is a charge for additional VIPs. And if you don’t use a reserved VIP (you reserve it and leave the cloud service suspended) then there’s a charge for the VIP.
Which leads us to the obvious follow-up question: how do I remove a reserved VIP? It’s not quite a logical undo. First you need to undo the association of the VIP reservation with the cloud service. Note that the following is not Remove-AzureReservedIP (that cost me 10 minutes):
Remove-AzureReservedIPAssociation -ReservedIPName "MyVIP01" -ServiceName “MyCloudService”
Note: I’ve noticed that this cmdlet takes a couple of minutes to run.
If you have the Azure portal open you might see it refresh and change the VIP of your cloud service – what you’ve done is remove the association of the VIP with that cloud service; the VIP is still reserved.
That opens up an interesting scenario. Let’s say I have an application called App1 running in CloudService1, and I’d like to build a new version of the application in CloudService2 and switch users over without them noticing.
- Reserve the VIP on CloudService1
- Set up DNS records for App1 to the reserved VIP
- Time passes by … until we want to migrate users …
- Remove the VIP association from CloudServcie1; the VIP is still reserved, but now unused
- Set the VIP association with CloudService2
And all of a sudden, people start using App1 on CloudService2 without changing DNS records … nice!
When you want to completely remove a VIP reservation, first make sure that you remove any cloud association with Remove-AzureReservedIPAssociation, and then run:
Remove-AzureReservedIP -ReservedIPName "MyVIP01"
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