How to integrate IPAM with SCVMM 2012 R2

Integrating IPAM with SCVMM 2012 R2

This blog post will show how to integrate your IPAM infrastructure together with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2.

For us who have been working quite a bit with the cloud infrastructure and fabric over the years, have noticed absence of integrated IP management. During projects, you will at some point need to know about the fabric infrastructure, and which IP’s, subnets, VLANs and so on to use.

It’s possible to model everything within VMM and have a single view into the relevant portions of your network infrastructure, however, the other way around has been painful.

So at one point, the network guys and the virtualization/cloud guys must sit down and have a chat with each other about this subject.

IPAM offers a unified, centralized administrative experience for network administrators to manage IP address space on a corporate network and in Microsoft-powered cloud networks.

The integration between IPAM and SCVMM 2012 R2 provides end-tp-end IP address space automation for your cloud networks. This means that a single IPAM server can detect and prevent IP address space conflicts, duplicates, and overlaps across multiple instances of SCVMM 2012 R2 deployed in the large datacenters (think fabric stamps).

1)     Navigate to the Fabric pane within the SCVMM console, right click on Network service and add a net Network service.

2)     Assign a name to your network service and eventually a description. Click next to continue.

3)     Specify manufacturer and model of network service. In this case the manufacturer is Microsoft, and the model is Microsoft Windows Server IP Address Management. Click next to proceed.

4)     Specify a Run as account that have access to your IPAM server role and continue by clicking next.

5)     The connection string should be the FQDN of your IPAM server. Click next.

6)     Test the configuration provider and ensure that the tests are passed for being able to add your IPAM server.

7)     Associate the network service with your desired host groups, and click next and finish to complete the wizard.

We have now integrated SCVMM 2012 R2 with IPAM, and can switch over to our IPAM server to see the data here.

As we can see, I have now all my logical networks and VM networks exposed in IPAM, and is also able to manage them from IPAM. This integration is bi-directional, and let the network admins have better control and view into the virtualization environment.

I will work in this area from now on to explore some of the possibilities here. Stay tunes.