Azure VNET to VNET VPN, across regions and data centers: not so complicated

After finding very interesting articles like this one (thanks, Matt Davies) around recently announced features on Azure, I wanted to push further the IaaS  experience on Microsoft’s public cloud by connecting multiple Azure virtual networks simultaneously, eventually across data centers. The utilization of this functionality becomes quickly interesting in various scenarios, like geo-highly available applications and disaster recovery plans.

So here is my scenario: let’s say we need 1 VNET in North Europe region (Dublin) to be connected to a second VNET  in the same datacenter and to a third one in West Europe (Amsterdam). We will test the result simply by pinging between 3 VMs, one in each VNET.

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Assumption: in order to keep this article to a reasonable size, I assume you are somehow familiar already with the main (Azure) IaaS concepts (VNET, VPN, VM, Local Network …).