Azure terminology
Some of the Azure terms that are used in the Citrix ADC VPX Azure documentation are listed below.
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Azure Load Balancer – Azure load balancer is a resource that distributes incoming traffic among computers in a network. Traffic is distributed among virtual machines defined in a load-balancer set. A load balancer can be external or internet-facing, or it can be internal.
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Azure Resource Manager (ARM) – ARM is the new management framework for services in Azure. Azure Load Balancer is managed using ARM-based APIs and tools.
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Back-End Address Pool – These are IP addresses associated with the virtual machine NIC (NIC) to which load will be distributed.
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BLOB - Binary Large Object – Any binary object like a file or an image that can be stored in Azure storage.
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Front-End IP Configuration – An Azure Load balancer can include one or more front-end IP addresses, also known as a virtual IPs (VIPs). These IP addresses serve as ingress for the traffic.
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Instance Level Public IP (ILPIP) – An ILPIP is a public IP address that you can assign directly to your virtual machine or role instance, rather than to the cloud service that your virtual machine or role instance resides in. This does not take the place of the VIP (virtual IP) that is assigned to your cloud service. Rather, it’s an extra IP address that you can use to connect directly to your virtual machine or role instance.
Note:
In the past, an ILPIP was referred to as a PIP, which stands for public IP.
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Inbound NAT Rules – This contains rules mapping a public port on the load balancer to a port for a specific virtual machine in the back end address pool.
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IP-Config - It can be defined as an IP address pair (public IP and private IP) associated with an individual NIC. In an IP-Config, the public IP address can be NULL. Each NIC can have multiple IP-Config associated with it, which can be up to 255.
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Load Balancing Rules – A rule property that maps a given front-end IP and port combination to a set of back-end IP addresses and port combination. With a single definition of a load balancer resource, you can define multiple load balancing rules, each rule reflecting a combination of a front end IP and port and back end IP and port associated with virtual machines.
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Network security group – Contains a list of Access Control List (ACL) rules that allow or deny network traffic to your virtual machine instances in a virtual network. NSGs can be associated with either subnets or individual virtual machine instances within that subnet. When a network security group is associated with a subnet, the ACL rules apply to all the virtual machine instances in that subnet. In addition, traffic to an individual virtual machine can be restricted further by associating a network security group directly to that virtual machine.
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Private IP addresses – Used for communication within an Azure virtual network, and your on-premises network when you use a VPN gateway to extend your network to Azure. Private IP addresses allow Azure resources to communicate with other resources in a virtual network or an on-premises network through a VPN gateway or ExpressRoute circuit, without using an Internet-reachable IP address. In the Azure Resource Manager deployment model, a private IP address is associated with the following types of Azure resources – virtual machines, internal load balancers (ILBs), and application gateways.
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Probes – This contains health probes used to check availability of virtual machines instances in the back end address pool. If a particular virtual machine does not respond to health probes for some time, then it is taken out of traffic serving. Probes enable you to keep track of the health of virtual instances. If a health probe fails, the virtual instance will be taken out of rotation automatically.
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Public IP Addresses (PIP) – PIP is used for communication with the Internet, including Azure public-facing services and is associated with virtual machines, Internet-facing load balancers, VPN gateways, and application gateways.
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Region - An area within a geography that does not cross national borders and that contains one or more data centers. Pricing, regional services, and offer types are exposed at the region level. A region is typically paired with another region, which can be up to several hundred miles away, to form a regional pair. Regional pairs can be used as a mechanism for disaster recovery and high availability scenarios. Also referred to generally as location.
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Resource Group - A container in Resource Manager holds related resources for an application. The resource group can include all of the resources for an application, or only those resources that are logically grouped together
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Storage Account – An Azure storage account gives you access to the Azure blob, queue, table, and file services in Azure Storage. Your storage account provides the unique namespace for your Azure storage data objects.
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Virtual Machine – The software implementation of a physical computer that runs an operating system. Multiple virtual machines can run simultaneously on the same hardware. In Azure, virtual machines are available in a variety of sizes.
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Virtual Network - An Azure virtual network is a representation of your own network in the cloud. It is a logical isolation of the Azure cloud dedicated to your subscription. You can fully control the IP address blocks, DNS settings, security policies, and route tables within this network. You can also further segment your VNet into subnets and launch Azure IaaS virtual machines and cloud services (PaaS role instances). Additionally, you can connect the virtual network to your on-premises network using one of the connectivity options available in Azure. In essence, you can expand your network to Azure, with complete control on IP address blocks with the benefit of enterprise scale Azure provides.
