I’ve written a couple of posts on how Veeam Powered Network can make accessing your homelab easy with it’s straight forward approach to creating and connection site-to-site and point-to-site VPN connections. For a refresh on the use cases that I’ve gone through, I had a requirement where I needed access to my homelab/office machines while on the road and to to achieve this I went through two scenarios on how you can deploy and configure Veeam PN.

In this blog post I’m going to run through a very real world solution with Veeam PN where it will be used to easily connect geographically disparate cloud hosting zones. One of the most common questions I used to receive from sales and customers in my previous roles with service providers is how do we easily connect up two sites so that some form of application high availability could be achieved or even just allowing access to applications or services cross site.

Taking that further…how is this achieved in the most cost effective and operationally efficient way? There are obviously solutions available today that achieve connectivity between multiple sites, weather that be via some sort of MPLS, IPSec, L2VPN or stretched network solution. What Veeam PN achieves is a simple to configure, cost effective (remember it’s free) way to connect up one to one or one to many cloud zones with little to no overheads.

Cloud to Cloud to Cloud Veeam PN Appliance Deployment Model

In this scenario I want each vCloud Director zone to have access to the other zones and be always connected. I also want to be able to connect in via the OpenVPN endpoint client and have access to all zones remotely. All zones will be routed through the Veeam PN Hub Server deployed into Azure via the Azure Marketplace. To go over the Veeam PN deployment process read my first post and also visit this VeeamKB that describes where to get the OVA and how to deploy and configure the appliance for first use.

Components

Veeam PN Hub Appliance x 1 (Azure)

Veeam PN Site Gateway x 3 (One Per Zettagrid vCD Zone)

OpenVPN Client (For remote connectivity)

Networking Overview and Requirements

Veeam PN Hub Appliance – Incoming Ports TCP/UDP 1194, 6179 and TCP 443 Azure VNET 10.0.0.0/16 Azure Veeam PN Endpoint IP and DNS Record

Veeam PN Site Gateways – Outgoing access to at least TCP/UDP 1194 Perth vCD Zone 192.168.60.0/24 Sydney vCD Zone 192.168.70.0/24 Melbourne vCD Zone 192.168.80.0/24

OpenVPN Client – Outgoing access to at least TCP/UDP 6179

In my setup the Veeam PN Hub Appliance has been deployed into Azure mainly because that’s where I was able to test out the product initially, but also because in theory it provides a centralised, highly available location for all the site-to-site connections to terminate into. This central Hub can be deployed anywhere and as long as it’s got HTTPS connectivity configured correctly to access the web interface and start to configure your site and standalone clients.

Configuring Site Clients for Cloud Zones (site-to-site):

To configuration the Veeam PN Site Gateway you need to register the sites from the Veeam PN Hub Appliance. When you register a client, Veeam PN generates a configuration file that contains VPN connection settings for the client. You must use the configuration file (downloadable as an XML) to set up the Site Gateway’s. Referencing the digram at the beginning of the post I needed to register three seperate client configurations as shown below.

Once this has been completed you need deploy a Veeam PN Site Gateway in each vCloud Hosting Zone…because we are dealing with an OVA the OVFTool will need to be used to upload the Veeam PN Site Gateway appliances. I’ve previously created and blogged about an OVFTool upload script using Powershell which can be viewed here. Each Site Gateway needs to be deployed and attached to the vCloud vORG Network that you want to extend…in my case it’s the 192.168.60.0, 192.168.70.0 and 192.168.80.0 vORG Networks.

Once each vCloud zone has has the Site Gateway deployed and the corresponding XML configuration file added you should see all sites connected in the Veeam PN Dashboard.At this stage we have connected each vCloud Zone to the central Hub Appliance which is configured now to route to each subnet. If I was to connect up an OpenVPN Client to the HUB Appliance I could access all subnets and be able to connect to systems or services in each location. Shown below is the Tunnelblick OpenVPN Client connected to the HUB Appliance showing the injected routes into the network settings.

You can see above that the 192.168.60.0, 192.168.70.0 and 192.168.80.0 static routes have been added and set to use the tunnel interfaces default gateway which is on the central Hub Appliance.

Adding Static Routes to Cloud Zones (Cloud to Cloud to Cloud):

To complete the setup and have each vCloud zone talking to each other we need to configure static routes on each zone network gateway/router so that traffic destined for the other subnets knows to be routed through to the Site Gateway IP, through to the central Hub Appliance onto the destination and then back. To achieve this you just need to add static routes to the router. In my example I have added the static route to the vCloud Edge Gateway through the vCD Portal as shown below in the Melbourne Zone.

Conclusion:

Summerizing the steps that where taken in order to setup and configure the configuration of a cloud to cloud to cloud network using Veeam PN through its site-to-site connectivity feature to allow cross site connectivity while allowing access to systems and services via the point-to-site VPN:

Deploy and configure Veeam PN Hub Appliance

Register Cloud Sites

Register Endpoints

Deploy and configure Veeam PN Site Gateway in each vCloud Zone

Configure static routes in each vCloud Zone

Those five steps took me less than 30 minutes which also took into consideration the OVA deployments as well. At the end of the day I’ve connected three disparate cloud zones at Zettagrid which all access each other through a Veeam PN Hub Appliance deployed in Azure. From here there is nothing stopping me from adding more cloud zones that could be situated in AWS, IBM, Google or any other public cloud. I could even connect up my home office or a remote site to the central Hub to give full coverage.

The key here is that Veeam Power Network offers a simple solution to what is traditionally a complex and costly one. Again, this will not suit all use cases but at it’s most basic functional level, it would have been the answer to the cross cloud connectivity questions I used to get that I mentioned at the start of the article.

Go give it a try!

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