azure subscription

Azure – Unable to ping Azure Virtual Machine from outside Azure

You buy a new Azure subscription, spin up an Azure Virtual Machine. Now you want to test if it is working or not. So, you pull up the infamous Command Prompt (or powershell) and Ping the VIP (Virtual/Public IP) of your Azure Virtual Machine. Wola!! The ping fails with 100% loss. But you can see that the Azure Portal shows that your virtual machine is up and running. To double check, you even RDP to your VM and it is all good. This is one of the many situations where the Azure new comers get confused. Let me break down this for you:-

The explanation for this behaviour is that the good old, Windows Ping.exe uses ICMP protocol to communicate. But the Azure Load Balancer does not support ICMP protocol when a connection is being made from external source to Azure. This means, your local computer will not be able to “Ping” (probing using Ping.exe) the Azure virtual Machines. However Azure Load Balancer allows ICMP protocol inside the azure (internally). This means, two Azure virtual machines are able to talk to each other.

The solution is to ping the port of your Virtual Machine.

Example: Ping xx.xx.xx.xx:1234

Since Ping.exe does not support probing the port, we have to use the other tools like PSPing, TCPPing etc, to achieve this.

This explains most of it. I am going to demonstrate whatever I just explained.

Below is the details of my virtual machine:

VM Details

When I ping the VIP – 13.76.247.67, using the default Ping.exe. You can observe that we end up having 100% packet loss.

packet_loss

This behaviour is because the Azure Load Balancer does not allow ICMP communication between Azure and the external source. And Microsoft’s Ping.exe uses ICMP protocol.

The solution is to use PSPing (among many other options), and ping the port of the Virtual Machine. Please note that you have to add relevant entry in the NSG (Network Security Group) to allow incoming traffic to your Virtual Machine.

Since this is just a Demo, I have allowed all the traffic to my Virtual Machine via the port 3389. You have to use appropriate NSG and ACLs to your Virtual Machine and Subnet, in your production environment. 

NSG_Allow_All

PSPing.exe comes with a bundle – PSTools. This toolset can be downloaded here.

Copy PsPing onto your executable path. Typing “psping” displays its usage syntax.

psping_syntax

Note: If you are using the PSPing tool for the first time, you may have to agree to the terms and conditions before using it.

Since I have my port – 3389 opened for all incoming traffic. I will go ahead and use the PSPing tool to ping the port from my local computer. And as you can see it works like a charm !!

ping_success

Finally, note that you can ping only to the port for which you have enabled the incoming traffic. Since I have not enabled port 80, I expect the packets to be dropped.

packet_loss_wrong_port

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Azure – Setting up Azure Subscription using PowerShell

The very fact that you are here reading this blog is because you have selected to manage your Azure service using Powreshell. Welcome to the team!!

I assume that you are already have a valid Azure subscription. Powershell 3.0 or higher and have the Windows Azure Powershell modules installed. If you do not have the Azure Powershell modules, you can download the Azure PowerShell module here.

Authenticating with a Certificate

You have to download the .publishsettings file from the Microsoft Azure . You can use the below command:

Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile

This will automatically ask you to select your favourite browser, so you can login to Microsoft Azure website.

get-publishfile

Now login with your credentials, that you always do with the Azure Portal

login

The file that we downloaded is very important and we have to handle it with a lot of care. Any one who can get their hands on this file, will have complete access to resources under that subscription. Microsoft imposes a limit on the total number of management certificates that can be associated with a subscription at a time. The number is 100 at the time of writing this blog. Each time you run the Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile cmdlet, Azure generates a new management certificate.

Importing the .pubishsettings file

The next step is to import the .publishsettings file that we just downloaded. I have saved in “E:\Work\Powershell\scripts”, so I am going to run the Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile cmdlet with the complete file path to the settings file.

Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile "E:\Work\Powershell\scripts\Pay-As-You-Go-9-9-2016-credentials.publishsettings"

import-settingfile

As you can see that the cmdlet outputs the subscription information, telling you that the settings are successfully imported.

To double confirm, you can run the Get-AzureSubscription cmdlet.

get-subscription

This cmdlet also tells you, if this subscription is your “Current” / “Default” subscription.

If you have multiple subscriptions, use the Set-AzureSubscription cmdlet to set any azure subscription as “Current” or “Default”.

Also, use the Select-AzureSubscription if you want to switch between subscriptions while working with Powershell.