When creating a VM in Azure you need to associate the VM to an ip addresss. Is it possible to reserve an IP address for an external device? For example, I have purchased an external harddrive(I won’t specify the name for fear of being accused of promoting a product), but it is a storage device that I connect to over my local broadband at home. I would like to connect to the storage device from any location, but in order to do that I would need to be able to assign the device an public IP address. Therefore, is it possible to reserve an IP address from Azure and assign that IP address to my personal storage device?
>Solution :
From the documentation page for Reserved IP addresses (classic deployment):
- Can I use a reserved IP for all Azure services? No. Reserved IPs can only be used for VMs and cloud service instance roles exposed through a VIP.
Since your "external harddrive" is not a VM or a cloud service instance, you cannot leverage it the way you seemingly want to.
You’d need to have additional infrastructure configured to build some kind of connection between some Azure-based infrastructure (with the Reserved IP address assigned to it) and the device on your local network, like a Site-to-Site VPN Gateway.
It would greatly behoove you to consider the security implications of such a setup, and whether your target deployment model needs to cater to usage of this drive by a broader user group or whether a simple VPN gateway on your local network’s router that you individually connect to would suffice.