Windows Azure Virtual Networks offers the power to open up several cross-premises use case scenarios, including Active Directory Disaster Recovery, SQL Database Replication, Windows Server 2012 DFS-R File Replication, Accelerated Cloud File Services with BranchCache, Hybrid Web Applications and MORE! But … we need to configure the Virtual Network FIRST … which is what this Step-by-Step article is all about!
This month, my fellow IT Pro Technical Evangelists and I are authoring a new articles series on 20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. You can catch the full series at http://aka.ms/CloudTop20. In today’s article in this series, we’ll discuss extending our On-premises Datacenter into a Hybrid Network Infrastructure with Windows Server 2012, Windows Azure Virtual Networks and Site-to-Site VPN Tunnels.
Windows Azure Virtual Networks allow us to securely extend our Private Cloud with a hybrid network infrastructure that leverages the best of two worlds: the low-latency and high-bandwidth available with our on-premise datacenter networks with the elastic, pay-as-you-go cloud model of Windows Azure Virtual Networks and Virtual Machines.