vNIOS for Azure Use Cases

The following are some of the common use cases for the Infoblox vNIOS for Azure appliance:

• Providing DNS and RPZ/DNS Firewall services from within the Azure cloud for Azure, on-prem, and public clients.

• Expanding services to the Azure cloud for additional fault tolerance and disaster recovery (DR) purposes.

• Providing services with maximum availability and across multiple VNets.

• Add Reporting and Analytics to the Infoblox Grid.

• Network Insight for IPAM discovery.

DNS and RPZ Services

In this use case, DNS and RPZ services are hosted in the Azure cloud. This enables you to distribute enterprise DNS services for clients operating in the Azure cloud, on-prem, and across the Internet. One or more Infoblox vNIOS for Azure appliances are deployed in Azure. These appliances can also be integrated with an existing Grid. Clients are then updated to use your Infoblox vNIOS for Azure appliance(s) for DNS resolution, providing them with your enterprise DNS and RPZ services. Beginning with NIOS 9.0.4, private and public Azure DNS zones can be synced into the Infoblox Grid, allowing your NIOS DNS servers to serve these zones to on-prem clients or clients in other clouds. For additional information on Azure DNS Sync, refer to the Infoblox Installation Guide vNIOS for Microsoft Azure.

Fault Tolerance and Disaster Recovery

This use case is for Fault Tolerance and Disaster Recovery. In case of failure in the Primary Datacenter (power outage, network outage, or other critical failure) an Infoblox vNIOS for Azure appliance enabled as a Grid Master Candidate (GMC) can be promoted to the Grid Master role so that Grid services can continue to operate. DNS services can also be redirected to servers operating in the Azure cloud, possibly without even requiring any manual intervention and helping ensure the business can continue to operate.

Maximum Availability

In many cases, it can be a challenge to implement services in a way that maximizes availability across a distributed environment in a secure manner and without deploying more resources than are required. One method for accomplishing this may be by leveraging ‘management’ or ‘transit’ VNets where critical services, including your Infoblox servers, operate from. VNet peering can be used to connect other VNets to the management VNet. This allows for seamless communications between those VNets and the management VNet, without allowing connectivity between the other subnets. Traditional routing and/or VPN’s can also be used to allow connectivity into the management VNet for VNets which cannot leverage VNet peering or even for networks from outside of Azure.

Reporting and Analytics

Infoblox Reporting and Analytics automates the collection, analysis, and presentation of core network service data that assists you in planning and mitigating network outage risks so you can manage your networks more efficiently. You can quickly create custom security reports and dashboards to identify security issues, ensuring that your network is secure and available. You can easily meet audit requirements with pre-configured, customizable compliance reports or quickly and easily create your own. To keep your Infoblox Grid running smoothly, you can track and project utilization of the Grid and easily forecast when you will need to scale up. Deploying Reporting members in Azure allows you to migrate workloads from data center to the cloud and take advantage of the reliability and high availability of Azure deployments.

Network Insight

Infoblox Network Insight automates network discovery and provides a unified network view of layer 2 to layer 3 devices connected to the network such as routers, switches, load balancers, SDN and SD-WAN devices, virtual devices etc. Built on Infoblox’s flagship solution NIOS DDI, Network Insight enables authoritative IP address management with enhanced visibility.  It enables network administrators to easily gather, correlate, and view network data to increase agility, reduce risk and lower cost. Thus, it provides unprecedented on-prem network visibility for network management, eliminates conflicts and outages, improves operational efficiency and silos with streamlined workflows, and simplifies audit and compliance.