Month: December 2015

How to add a NIC to an Azure Virtual Machine (ARM)

Samir Farhat Azure , ,

Hi all,

In this short post, I will show you how to add a  NIC (third, fourth…) to an Azure virtual machine under Azure Resource Manager and using Azure Powershell.

Before continuing, keep in mind:

– Not all the virtual machines sizes support multiple NICs. Check if your VM size is supported ( https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-size-specs/)

– The VM should already have at least two NICs. It’s not supported to pass from a single NIC VM to multiple NIC VM and vice versa

– If you are creating the VM with multiple NICs (Use this post to do it), the resource group to which you are deploying the VM must contain only [multiple NIC]’s VM types. In other words, you cannot create a VM with multiple NICs in a resource group containing [single NIC]’s VMs It seems that this limitation was removed

– The VM will be rebooted when adding a virtual NIC

– You can use Azure CLI, Azure API or Powershell to make this operation. The portal does not provide a way to add a  NIC.

– In this post I’m using Azure Powershell 1.0. If you are using the 0.9.8 or prior, remove the ‘Rm’ suffix from your commands and change the mode to ResourceManager

Walkthrough

This is easy, only two steps:

  1. Create a new Virtual NIC
  2. Attach the VNIC to the virtual machine

1- Create a new Virtual NIC

The first step is to create a Virtual NIC to associate it later to to the virtual machine. You will need to provide the following information:

  • The  Name of the virtual NIC to be created : $NICName
  • The Resource Group Name where the VNIC will be created : $NICResourceGroup
  • The location/region where the VNIC will be created, of course it has to match the VNET/Subnet location : $Location
  • The subnet ID to which you will connect the VNIC, you can get it via Powershell (See my example below) : $SubnetID
  • The IP address you want to assign to the NIC : $IPAddress

Powershell

# Get the VNET to which to connect the NIC
$VNET = Get-AzureRmVirtualNetwork -Name ‘VnetV2’ -ResourceGroupName ‘RGNetworkV2’
# Get the Subnet ID to which to connect the NIC
$SubnetID = (Get-AzureRmVirtualNetworkSubnetConfig -Name ‘VNETV2Subnet01’ -VirtualNetwork $VNET).Id
# NIC Name
$NICName = ‘A3VM-NIC3’
#NIC Resource Group
$NICResourceGroup = ‘RG’
#NIC creation location
$Location = ‘north europe’
#Enter the IP address
$IPAddress = ‘10.20.30.21’

#–> Create now the NIC Interface

New-AzureRmNetworkInterface -Name $NICName -ResourceGroupName $NICResourceGroup -Location $Location -SubnetId $SubnetID -PrivateIpAddress $IPAddress

 

2-  Attach the VNIC to the Virtual Machine

The second and last step is to associate the created VNIC to to the virtual machine. You will need to provide the following information:

  • The virtual machine Name : $VMname
  • The Virtual machine resource Group : $VMRG

Powershell

$VMname = ‘VMname’
$VMRG =  ‘VM-RG’

#Get the VM
$VM = Get-AzureRmVM -Name $VMname -ResourceGroupName $VMRG

#Add the second NIC
$NewNIC =  Get-AzureRmNetworkInterface -Name $NICName -ResourceGroupName $NICResourceGroup
$VM = Add-AzureRmVMNetworkInterface -VM $VM -Id $NewNIC.Id

# Show the Network interfaces
$VM.NetworkProfile.NetworkInterfaces

#we have to set one of the NICs to Primary, i will set the first NIC in this example
$VM.NetworkProfile.NetworkInterfaces.Item(0).Primary = $true

#Update the VM configuration (The VM will be restarted)
Update-AzureRmVM -VM $VM -ResourceGroupName $VMRG