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Tutorial: Configure peering between Azure Route Server and Network Virtual Appliance

  • Article
  • 6 minutes to read

This tutorial shows you how to deploy an Azure Route Server into a virtual network and establish a BGP peering connection with a Quagga network virtual appliance (NVA). You'll deploy a virtual network with four subnets. One subnet will be dedicated to the Route Server and another subnet dedicated to the Quagga NVA. The Quagga NVA will be configured to exchange routes with the Route Server. Lastly, you'll test to make sure routes are properly exchanged on the Route Server and Quagga NVA.

In this tutorial, you learn how to:

  • Create a virtual network with five subnets
  • Deploy an Azure Route Server
  • Deploy a virtual machine running Quagga
  • Configure Route Server peering
  • Check learned routes

If you don't have an Azure subscription, create a free account before you begin.

Prerequisites

  • An Azure subscription

Sign in to Azure

Sign in to the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com.

Create a virtual network

You'll need a virtual network to deploy both the Route Server and the Quagga NVA. Azure Route Server must be deployed in a dedicated subnet called RouteServerSubnet.

  1. On the Azure portal home page, search for virtual network, and select Virtual networks from the search results.

    Screenshot of create a new virtual network resource.

  2. On the Virtual networks page, select + Create.

  3. On the Basics tab of Create virtual network, enter or select the following information:

    Settings Value
    Project details
    Subscription Select your Azure subscription.
    Resource group Select Create new.
    In Name enter myRouteServerRG.
    Select OK.
    Instance details
    Name Enter myVirtualNetwork.
    Region Select East US.

    Screenshot of basics tab settings for the virtual network.

  4. Select IP Addresses tab or Next : IP Addresses > button.

  5. On the IP Addresses tab, configure IPv4 address space to 10.1.0.0/16, then configure the following subnets:

    Subnet name Subnet address range
    RouteServerSubnet 10.1.1.0/25
    subnet1 10.1.2.0/24
    subnet2 10.1.3.0/24
    subnet3 10.1.4.0/24

    Screenshot of IP address settings for the virtual network.

  6. Select Review + create and then select Create after the validation passes.

Create the Azure Route Server

The Route Server is used to communicate with your NVA and exchange virtual network routes using a BGP peering connection.

  1. On the Azure portal, search for route server, and select Route Servers from the search results.

  2. On the Route Servers page, select + Create.

  3. On the Basics tab of Create a Route Server page, enter or select the following information:

    Settings Value
    Project details
    Subscription Select your Azure subscription that you used for the virtual network.
    Resource group Select myRouteServerRG.
    Instance details
    Name Enter myRouteServer.
    Region Select East US region.
    Configure virtual networks
    Virtual Network Select myVirtualNetwork.
    Subnet Select RouteServerSubnet (10.1.0.0/25). This subnet is a dedicated Route Server subnet.
    Public IP address
    Public IP address Select Create new, and then enter myRouteServer-ip. This Standard IP address ensures connectivity to the backend service that manages the Route Server configuration.

    Screenshot of basics tab for Route Server creation.

  4. Select Review + create and then select Create after validation passes. The Route Server takes about 15 minutes to deploy.

Create Quagga network virtual appliance

To configure the Quagga network virtual appliance, you'll need to deploy a Linux virtual machine, and then configure it with this script.

Create Quagga virtual machine (VM)

  1. On the Azure portal, search for virtual machine, and select Virtual machines from the search results.

  2. Select Create, then select Azure virtual machine.

  3. On the Basics tab of Create a virtual machine, enter or select the following information:

    Settings Value
    Project details
    Subscription Select your Azure subscription that you used for the virtual network.
    Resource group Select myRouteServerRG.
    Instance details
    Virtual machine name Enter Quagga.
    Region Select (US) East US.
    Availability options Select No infrastructure required.
    Security type Select Standard.
    Image Select Ubuntu 18.04 LTS - Gen 2.
    Size Select Standard_B2s - 2vcpus, 4GiB memory.
    Administrator account
    Authentication type Select Password.
    Username Enter azureuser. Don't use quagga as the user name or else the setup script will fail in a later step.
    Password Enter a password of your choosing.
    Confirm password Reenter the password.
    Inbound port rules
    Public inbound ports Select Allow selected ports.
    Select inbound ports Select SSH (22).

    Screenshot of basics tab for creating a new virtual machine.

  4. On the Networking tab, select the following network settings:

    Settings Value
    Virtual network Select myVirtualNetwork.
    Subnet Select subnet3 (10.1.4.0/24).
    Public IP Leave as default.
    NIC network security group Select Basic.
    Public inbound ports Select Allow selected ports.
    Select inbound ports Select SSH (22).

    Screenshot of networking tab for creating a new virtual machine.

  5. Select Review + create and then Create after validation passes. The deployment of the virtual machine will take about 10 minutes.

  6. Once the virtual machine has deployed, go to the Networking page of Quagga virtual machine and select the network interface.

    Screenshot of networking page of the Quagga VM.

  7. Select IP configuration under Settings and then select ipconfig1.

    Screenshot of IP configurations page of the Quagga VM.

  8. Under Private IP address Settings, change the Assignment from Dynamic to Static, and then change the IP address from 10.1.4.4 to 10.1.4.10. This IP address is used in this script, which will be run in a later step. If you want to use a different IP address, ensure to update the IP in the script.

  9. Take note of the public IP, and select Save to update the IP configurations of the virtual machine.

    Screenshot of changing IP configurations the Quagga VM.

Configure Quagga virtual machine

  1. If you are on a Mac or Linux machine, open a Bash prompt. If you are on a Windows machine, open a PowerShell prompt.

  2. At your prompt, open an SSH connection to the Quagga VM. Replace the IP address with the one you took note of in the previous step.

ssh azureuser@52.240.57.121

  1. When prompted, enter the password you previously created for the Quagga VM.

  2. Once logged in, enter sudo su to switch to super user to avoid errors running the script. Copy this script and paste it into the SSH session. The script will configure the virtual machine with Quagga along with other network settings. Update the script to suit your network environment before running it on the virtual machine. It will take a few minutes for the script to complete the setup.

Configure Route Server peering

  1. Go to the Route Server you created in the previous step.

  2. Select Peers under Settings. Then, select + Add to add a new peer.

    Screenshot of peers page for Route Server.

  3. On the Add Peer page, enter the following information, and then select Add to save the configuration:

    Setting Value
    Name Enter Quagga. This name is used to identify the peer.
    ASN Enter 65001. This ASN is defined in the script for Quagga NVA.
    IPv4 Address Enter 10.1.4.10. This IPv4 is the private IP of the Quagga NVA.

    Screenshot of add peer page.

  4. Once you add the Quagga NVA as a peer, the Peers page should look like this:

    Screenshot of a configured peer.

Check learned routes

  1. To check the routes learned by the Route Server, use this command in Azure portal Cloud Shell:

    $routes = @{
    RouteServerName = 'myRouteServer'
    ResourceGroupName = 'myRouteServerRG'
    PeerName = 'Quagga'
}
Get-AzRouteServerPeerLearnedRoute @routes | ft

    The output should look like the following:

    Screenshot of routes learned by Route Server.

  2. To check the routes learned by the Quagga NVA, enter vtysh and then enter show ip bgp on the NVA. Output should look like the following:

    root@Quagga:/home/azureuser# vtysh

Hello, this is Quagga (version 1.2.4).
Copyright 1996-2005 Kunihiro Ishiguro, et al.

Quagga# show ip bgp
BGP table version is 0, local router ID is 10.1.4.10
Status codes: s suppressed, d damped, h history, * valid, > best, = multipath,
              i internal, r RIB-failure, S Stale, R Removed
Origin codes: i - IGP, e - EGP, ? - incomplete

    Network          Next Hop            Metric LocPrf Weight Path
    10.1.0.0/16      10.1.1.4                               0 65515 i
                     10.1.1.5                               0 65515 i
*> 10.100.1.0/24    0.0.0.0                  0         32768 i
*> 10.100.2.0/24    0.0.0.0                  0         32768 i
*> 10.100.3.0/24    0.0.0.0                  0         32768 i

Clean up resources

When no longer needed, you can delete all resources created in this tutorial by following these steps:

  1. On the Azure portal menu, select Resource groups.

  2. Select the myRouteServerRG resource group.

  3. Select Delete resource group.

  4. Enter myRouteServerRG and select Delete.

Next steps

In this tutorial, you learned how to create and configure an Azure Route Server with a network virtual appliance (NVA). To learn more about Route Servers, see Azure Route Server frequently asked questions (FAQs).