Team,
As we all know, Azure’s DHCP servers are responsible for assigning private IP addresses to any resources deployed inside of an Azure VNet (e.g. a VM). Therefore, you do not need to, and should not, bring your own DHCP solution to Azure.
However, this is somewhat problematic, as it does not allow us to centrally assign TCP/IP configuration values to Azure VMs by means of DHCP options. For example:
- For on-premises machines, which are DHCP-enabled clients, the NTP servers to be used by these machines are automatically pushed through DHCP.
- For Azure machines, which are clients of Azure’s DHCP servers and not connected to a custom DHCP solution, the NTP servers to be used by these machines have to be manually specified in some other way
In the example above, these NTP servers could be specified either through (1) post-deployment activities (for example, Custom Script Extension) or (2) some kind of Configuration Management tool (maybe PowerShell DSC if an appropriate module for setting NTP is available, or other enterprise-grade solutions such as Chef or Puppet).
So questions:
- Is my understanding correct that we should completely abandon any thoughts of managing any kind of TCP/IP configuration of Azure VMs through DHCP?
- Is my understand correct that the only available alternatives are either post-deployment scripting, or using some other Configuration Management tool?