Azure BGP Network Triangulation (from your home!)

In this post I’ll show how to setup two Azure BGP gateways in different locations and a third BGP gateway at Home using VyOS. (a community fork of Vyatta)

VyOS is an open source network operating system that can be installed on physical hardware or a virtual machine on your own server (or laptop) at home (or on premise)

Using VyOS allows experimentation with some more advanced networking features such as IPsec and BGP routing that would normally require a device such as a Cisco router other hardware options.

VyOS can be run in a small Hyper-V (or VirtualBox) VM on your own laptop and provided you have DMZ capabilities on your home internet router (most do) from your home network.

In this lab we’ll setup something that looks like this:

We’ll get VM1 pinging VM2

Then we’ll deliberately break one of the IPsec links and show that the connectivity remains and is automatically handled by the BGP routing adjustments to use an alternative route:

We’ll break this down into four sections:

• Part 1 – Setting up Azure in Region 1 (West Europe).
• Part 2 – Setting up Azure in Region 2 (North Europe).
• Part 3 – Setting up your home VM’s
• Part 4 – Testing the Triangulation