Good Morning Everybody!
I am new to Azure and am really impressed with what I am seeing. I am running into a few challenges and I am not sure whether this is because the feature does not exist yet or because I haven't figured it out yet.
I need to provision a mail server. This means I need a server with a public IP that never changes that has reverse DNS configured. This seems like it should be pretty easy.
1. I created a new VM with the "Service Manager" deployment model.
2. I gave it a public IP.
ISSUE #1: My first issue is that whenever I stop the VM, my IP address changes. I saw that IP addresses could either be Static or Dynamic so I disassociated the IP from the NIC and changed the IP address to "Static". When I went to associate the IP back to the NIC, I was not able to do so because it said that static IP addresses could only be associated to a load balancer.
ISSUE #2: Ok. So I need a load balancer. I assume that I can create a load balancer with just one server behind it. I Click on "New", search for "Load Balancer" and the only thing I see that makes sense is "Traffic Manager" (Why doesn't Load Balancer show up here?) and that is in the legacy portal and does not have anything to do with IP addresses. After a ton of searching, I found this cmdlet: New-AzureLoadBalancer . I was able to create a load balancer and it appears as if I need to give it an availability set, but there does not seem to be any way to move my existing VM into a new availability set. Am I missing something?
ISSUE #3: How do I set up reverse DNS on an existing IP? I found that when creating a new IP with New-AzurePublicIpAddress I can specify a reverseDNS name. I tried creating a new IP and specifying a reverseDNS name. The command succeeded, but querying the IP for RDNS returns nothing. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks for your help everybody. I know I must be missing something because right now I'm feeling as though Azure is a half-baked solution.