We are proud to announce that from now on, we offer fully automated private networking in our datacenters in Singapore, Frankfurt and San Francisco. Using the Leaseweb developer API or the Customer Portal, customers can create an infrastructure using bare metal servers within the same data center, simply by adding the servers to the private network. This service will be available also in our Washington D.C. and Amsterdam-based data centers within the next three months.
Within the new private networking solution, all connectivity between server racks is redundant and scalable. The solution is suitable for organizations of all sizes, but you can start small and add new servers that are connected anywhere in the datacenter at a later stage. This would be ideal for companies that have an unpredictable growth. Of course, the solution is also compatible with larger scale deployments.
With this service, we offer a layer 2 connection to our customers with 1 VLAN and DHCP services, that provides a /27 to all connected servers to facilitate any additional features and future products on this platform. Naturally, customers are free to use any preferred address instead of Leaseweb’s DHCP address – all though this might complicate connectivity to other features and products in the future.
Like all Leaseweb services, private networking is easy to manage. Here’s a video that shows you how to set up a private network in the Customer Portal (under Bare Metal Servers > Private Network) within minutes. It walks you through all the required steps, demonstrates how you can verify connectivity and explains how you can disconnect a server from the network.
Once your private network is ready, there are various ways of using the platform. Here are some examples:
- In the first setup, database traffic and webserver application traffic can be routed via the private network. This ensures that the traffic that is generated between these servers will not be part of the uplink usage and will be free of charge. Please note that it is important to configure applications accordingly, otherwise the traffic will still use the public network.
- In example #2, public uplinks of the application and database servers are disabled from the Customer Portal (by disabling the public switch port). These servers will not have Internet access and will only serve their services using the internal network.
- In a third configuration, all the servers are disconnected from their primary public uplinks, and one server is installed as gateway. Such a scenario can be enriched with software load balancers and firewalls. In this scenario, the public IP’s of the different servers cannot be routed to this gateway box.
To see if your server has an automated private network, please check the specifications in our knowledge base. If the automated private network is not (yet) available for your server, it is possible to create your own private network between servers. Provided your servers are located within the same rack, Leaseweb can create an interconnect between them free of charge for up to 2 servers. For larger networks, we offer managed and unmanaged switches, as well as in-house cabling between racks.
Want to learn more about the options? Visit our website.