Creating an Application Gateway in Microsoft Azure

Summary

In this lab, you will provision an Application Gateway in Microsoft Azure. You will configure the Application Gateway to balance web traffic between two web servers deployed on Microsoft Virtual Machines.

Each exercise below builds upon the previous one. You should start each new exercise from the last step of the previous exercise unless it is explicitly written otherwise.

Learning Objectives

After completion of this lab, you will be able to:

Prerequisites

To complete this lab, you will need the following:

Changes in the VM Creation

When following the instructions for the Azure VM with Ubuntu and NGINX Web Server lab, implement the following changes:

• In Exercise #1: Provision a Linux VM in Microsoft Azure, do the following changes:
  • In Step 6, for the Resource group, select the resource group networkinglab01-rg you have created in the Creating Virtual Network and Subnets in Azure lab instead creating a new resource group
  • In Step 7, use computelab01-vm02 for the Name of the second Virtual Machine
  • In Step 14, select the Virtual Network networkinglab01-vnet you have created in the Creating Virtual Network and Subnets in Azure lab instead creating a new Virtual Network
    
    Note: Make sure that the Virtual Network and the Virtual Machine are in the same Region
  • In Step 14, select the private (10.1.2.0/24) Subnet you have created in the Creating Virtual Network and Subnets in Azure lab instead creating a new virtual network
• In Exercise #5: Modify the web server’s home page, do the following changes:
  • In Step 4, type the following
    Hello, <code>computelabadmin!</code>! I am virtual machine #01 for the first virtual machine, and
    Hello again, <code>computelabadmin!</code>! I am virtual machine #02 for the second virtual machine

Exercise #1: Provision an Application Gateway in Microsoft Azure

In this exercise, you will provision an Application Gateway in Microsoft Azure. The Gateway will be provisioned in the already created Virtual Network.

Steps

1. 1. Sign into the Microsoft Azure Management Portal at http://portal.azure.com using your Microsoft Account
   2. Click on in the upper left corner right under the logo
   3. In the search box search for Application Gateway
      
   4. Click on the button
   5. On the Create an application gateway blade, on the Basics tab, in the Project details section, fill in the following information:
      Resource group → networkinglab01-rg
   6. In the Instance details section, fill in the following information:
      Application gateway name → networkinglab01-ag
      Region → (US) West US 2
      Tier → Standard V2
      Enable autoscaling → No
      Instances → 2
      Availability zone → None
      HTTP/2 → Disabled
   7. In the Configure virtual network section, fill in the following information:
      Virtual network → networkinglab01-vnet
      Subnet → public (10.1.1.0/27)
   8. Click on the button, and fill in the following information:
      Frontend IP address type → Public
      Public IP address → Create new
      Public IP address Name → networkinglab01-ip
   9. Click on the button
   10. Click on the link
   11. On the Add a backend pool blade, fill in the following information:
       Name → networkinglab01-ag-bepool
   12. In the Backend targets section, select Virtual Machine as the target type
   13. Select computelab01-vm01 in the first row
   14. Repeat Step 12 and Step 13 for computelab01-vm02 in the second row
   15.  Milestone step:  At this point, you have learned how to add a backend pool to the Application Gateway
   16. Click on the button
   17. Click on the button
   18. Click on the button
   19. On the Add a routing rule blade, fill in the following information:
       Name → http-rule
   20. On the Add a routing rule blade, on the Listener tab, fill in the following information:
       Name → http-listener
       Frontend IP → public
       Protocol → HTTP
       Port → 80
       Listener type → Basic
       Error page URL → No
   21. On the Add a routing rule blade, on the Backend targets tab, fill in the following information:
       Backend target → networkinglab01-ag-bepool
       HTTP settings → Create new
   22. On the Add an HTTP setting blade, fill in the following information:
       Name → http-besetting
   23. Click on the link
   24.  Milestone step:  At this point, you have learned how to add a routing rule to the Application Gateway
   25. Click on the button
   26. Click on the button
   27. On the Tags tab, add the following tags:
       Role → web
       Lab → networkinglab01
       Owner → <your name>
       OwnerEmail → <your email>
   28. Click on the button
   29. Review the summary and click on the button
   30. Wait until the deployment is completed
   31. Once the deployment is completed, click on in the left-hand menu list
   32. Find the networkinglab01-rg resource group in the list and click on it
   33.  Milestone step:  At this point, you have learned how to provision and configure an Application Gateway in the Microsoft Azure cloud. Note that although you requested the creation of a single resource, multiple were created. Verify that you have the following resources in your networkinglab01-rg resource group:
       networkinglab01-ag Application Gateway
       networkinglab01-ip Public IP Address
       

Exercise #2: Testing an Application Gateway in Microsoft Azure

In this exercise, you will test the Application Gateway that you created in Microsoft Azure. You can test the Application Gateway by accessing its IP address from a browser.

Steps

1. Click on the networkinglab01-ag Application Gateway resource
2. In the Overview tab, note the Frontend public IP address
3. Open a new browser window, and paste the above IP address in the Address Bar
4.  Milestone step:  The page shows the home page of the NGINX server on computelab01-vm01
5. Refresh the page in the browser
6.  Milestone step:  The page shows the home page of the NGINX server on computelab01-vm02
   
   Note: Depending on your browser’s caching settings, you may need to refresh the page more than once to see the second home page