If you’ve experimented with Microsoft Azure, or are already using it for some of your IT functionality, you may be ready to take that next step and integrate your infrastructure with Azure so you can use it as an extension to your on-premises infrastructure. Finding all the information that helps you do this can be very time consuming. To help decrease the amount of time required to extend your datacenter to Azure, we’ve published the Datacenter extension reference architecture diagram, shown below.
The diagram shows what a datacenter extension might look like, but it probably also leaves you wondering what everything in it is exactly, and why it’s in the diagram.
What’s great about the diagram is that it’s interactive. You can hover your mouse over every object in the diagram to learn more about it, and to see example data for how on-premises network, name resolution, and identities can be integrated with Azure. The image below shows what happens when a server on the Azure side of the diagram is hovered over with a mouse.
Clicking your mouse on many of the objects takes you to a detailed design or implementation article about the object. You can download and modify the Visio diagram used in the interactive web page above and the Excel spreadsheet that contains all of the data shown in the diagram, as well as additional data not shown in the diagram. Rather than discovering all the information on your own, you can watch a 42 minute walkthrough video that provides a thorough walkthrough of everything in the diagram, or you can just download the video’s script if you prefer.
We hope the interactive diagram and the data within it accelerate your datacenter integration with Azure!