Introduction:
In this article we are going to see how to add and remove firewall rules using the Management Portal in SQL Azure.
Overview:
SQL Azure firewall rules are provided to protect the data and to prevent access restrictions to the SQL Azure database. Firewall grants access to the originating IP's from which we are trying to access the database. In order to configure the firewall we need to configure a range of acceptable IP addresses upon which we try to connect to the SQL Azure server using the Management Portal or with the SQL Server Management Studio. Let us see the step by step process of adding and deleting rules as per our IP configurations.
Steps:
Log in to the Azure portal using the following link. You can see the screen look similar to below.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/
Login to the portal using your Microsoft Windows Live credentials with Azure credentials to the Management Portal and you will see the screen as shown in the screen below:
Now we can see the Database Menu at the bottom left: click on that to go to the Database Subscription window as shown in the screen below:
Clicking on the subscription name will provide the complete details of the server created and the new database created as shown in the screen below:
Now we are ready to add the firewall rules to configure the acceptable IP addresses from which we can access the SQL Azure database. In the sample shown below we have the IP address of HOME servers. Similarly we can configure the IP address of Office and other acceptable ones as per our requirements.
Now lets see on how to add a new IP to the firewall. Click on the ADD button as shown in the screen below, but before you do note the database server as well if you have more than one subscription available for use.
Now we can see a pop-up window asking for the IP address Start and End range. Here we can configure a series of IPs or to configure a single IP provide the that IP in both Start and End range as shown in the screen below. Also there is straight forward option of for using the IP we are currently using to access the portal (your current IP address). We can just copy and paste that IP if we are going to try from that server itself.
Now we can see that the IP Range is added to the firewall rules as shown in the screen below. We can delete or update IP addresses by clicking on the IP address and select the appropriate action.
We can configure to add, delete or update as many firewall IP's as per our requirements.
Conclusion:
So in this article we have seen how to configure firewall rules on how to add / delete / update them based on our requirement using the SQL Azure Management Portal.