Infoblox vNIOS for GCP Use Cases

The following are common use cases for the Infoblox vNIOS for GCP appliance:

The DNS and RPZ Services Use Case

In this use case, DNS and RPZ services are hosted in GCP. This enables you to distribute enterprise DNS services for clients operating in GCP, on-prem, and across the Internet. One or more Infoblox vNIOS for GCP appliances are deployed in GCP across as many different zones and regions as feasible. These appliances can also be integrated with an existing Grid, either on-prem or in the cloud. Clients are then updated to use your Infoblox vNIOS for GCP appliance(s) for DNS resolution, providing them with your enterprise DNS and RPZ services.

The Fault Tolerance and Disaster Recovery Use Case

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 GCP 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 GCP, possibly without even requiring any manual intervention and helping ensure that business continues to function.

DHCP Service for On-Premises Clients

A vNIOS appliance running on GCP can provide DHCP service for your on-premises clients. This DHCP appliance can serve as your primary DHCP server or be configured as part of a failover pair with a NIOS DHCP server running on-premises for a hybrid, survivable solution. Two vNIOS appliances, each running in GCP could also be configured for DHCP failover for highly available, fault tolerant DHCP services. Using a vNIOS appliance running on GCP for DHCP requires using DHCP Relay or IP Helper on your router or layer 3 switch to send DHCP traffic from your on-premises network to your GCP VPC.

The Maximum Availability Use Case

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 a ‘shared services VPC Network’ where critical services, including your Infoblox servers, operate from. VPC Network Peering can be used to connect other VPC Networks to the management VPC Network.

This allows for seamless communications between those VPC Networks and the shared services VPC Network, without allowing connectivity between the other subnets. Traditional routing and/or VPN’s can also be used to allow connectivity into the shared services VPC Network for VPC Networks which cannot leverage VPC Network Peering, or even from networks outside of GCP.