We have recently decided to invest in an Express Route circuit for Azure. It is supposed to be helpful with Azure and Office 365. There are two ways to provision the ExpressRoute circuit. Both require PowerShell.
There is the classic: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/expressroute-howto-circuit-classic/
And there is the Resource Manager: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/expressroute-howto-circuit-arm/
Here is the note about those options:
Resource Manager: This is the newest deployment model for Azure resources. Most newer resources already support this deployment model and eventually all resources will.
Classic: This model is supported by most existing Azure resources today. New resources added to Azure will not support this model.
This seems to indicate that using Resource Manager is the right way to go long term.
The problem (for me currently) is the documentation isn’t quite where I think it should be. If you try to run the commands to setup Express Route and ask for detailed help, you get little if any helpful information.
One item that kind of bothers me. When you request the service provider information using the “Get-AzureRmExpressRouteServiceProvider” command, the results are not as informative as they need to be. I say this because the results look like this:
Name : Verizon
Id : /subscriptions//resourceGroups//providers/Microsoft.Network/expressRouteServiceProviders/
ProvisioningState :
Type : Microsoft.Network/expressRouteServiceProviders
PeeringLocations : null
BandwidthsOffered : nullName : Vodafone
Id : /subscriptions//resourceGroups//providers/Microsoft.Network/expressRouteServiceProviders/
ProvisioningState :
Type : Microsoft.Network/expressRouteServiceProviders
PeeringLocations : null
BandwidthsOffered : nullName : Zayo Group
Id : /subscriptions//resourceGroups//providers/Microsoft.Network/expressRouteServiceProviders/
ProvisioningState :
Type : Microsoft.Network/expressRouteServiceProviders
PeeringLocations : null
BandwidthsOffered : null
From that you are supposed to then run a command (per the documentation) that looks like this:
New-AzureRmExpressRouteCircuit -Name "ExpressRouteARMCircuit" -ResourceGroupName "ExpressRouteResourceGroup" -Location "West US" -SkuTier Standard -SkuFamily MeteredData -ServiceProviderName "Equinix" -PeeringLocation "Silicon Valley" -BandwidthInMbps 200
The problem is the previous results don’t give you the PeeringLocation. All of them come back as “null”. I looked at the sample output from the “Classic” process and picked the location that seemed to make the most sense. The command finished so I assume that it worked correctly.