Networking considerations for Azure File Sync
You can connect to an Azure file share in two ways:
- Access the share directly via the SMB or FileREST protocols. This access pattern is primarily employed to eliminate as many on-premises servers as possible.
- Create a cache of the Azure file share on an on-premises server (or Azure virtual machine) with Azure File Sync, and access the file share's data from the on-premises server with your protocol of choice (SMB, NFS, FTPS, etc.). This access pattern is handy because it combines the best of both on-premises performance and cloud scale with value-added services such as Azure Backup.
This article focuses on the second scenario: how to configure networking when your use case calls for using Azure File Sync to cache files on-premises rather than directly mounting the Azure file share over SMB. For more information about networking considerations for an Azure Files deployment, see Azure Files networking considerations.
Networking configuration for Azure File Sync spans two different Azure objects: a Storage Sync Service and an Azure storage account. A storage account is a management construct that represents a shared pool of storage in which you can deploy multiple file shares, as well as other storage resources, such as blobs or queues. A Storage Sync Service is a management construct that represents registered servers, which are Windows file servers with an established trust relationship with Azure File Sync, and sync groups, which define the topology of the sync relationship.
Connecting Windows file server to Azure with Azure File Sync
To set up and use Azure Files and Azure File Sync with an on-premises Windows file server, no special networking to Azure is required beyond a basic internet connection. To deploy Azure File Sync, you install the Azure File Sync agent on the Windows file server you would like to sync with Azure. The Azure File Sync agent achieves synchronization with an Azure file share via two channels:
- The FileREST protocol, which is an HTTPS-based protocol used for accessing your Azure file share. Because the FileREST protocol uses standard HTTPS for data transfer, port 443 must be accessible outbound. Azure File Sync doesn't use the SMB protocol to transfer data between your on-premises Windows Servers and your Azure file share.
- The Azure File Sync sync protocol, which is an HTTPS-based protocol used for exchanging synchronization knowledge, namely the version information about the files and folders between endpoints in your environment. This protocol is also used to exchange metadata about the files and folders, such as timestamps and access control lists (ACLs).
Because Azure Files offers direct SMB protocol access on Azure file shares, customers often wonder if they need to configure special networking to mount the Azure file shares using SMB for the Azure File Sync agent to access. This isn't required and is actually discouraged except in administrator scenarios, due to the lack of quick change detection on changes made directly to the Azure file share. Changes might not be discovered for more than 24 hours depending on the size and number of items in the Azure file share. If you want to use the Azure file share directly instead of using Azure File Sync to cache on-premises, see Azure Files networking overview.
Although Azure File Sync doesn't require any special networking configuration, some customers might want to configure advanced networking settings to enable the following scenarios:
- Interoperate with your organization's proxy server configuration.
- Open your organization's on-premises firewall to the Azure Files and Azure File Sync services.
- Tunnel Azure Files and Azure File Sync traffic over an ExpressRoute or a virtual private network (VPN) connection.
Configuring proxy servers
Many organizations use a proxy server as an intermediary between resources inside their on-premises network and resources outside their network, such as in Azure. Proxy servers are useful for many applications such as network isolation and security, monitoring, and logging. Azure File Sync can interoperate fully with a proxy server, however you must manually configure the proxy endpoint settings for your environment with Azure File Sync. This must be done via PowerShell using the Azure File Sync server cmdlet Set-StorageSyncProxyConfiguration.
For more information on how to configure Azure File Sync with a proxy server, see Configuring Azure File Sync with a proxy server.
Configuring firewalls and service tags
Many organizations isolate their file servers from most internet locations for security purposes. To use Azure File Sync in such an environment, you need to configure your firewall to allow outbound access to select Azure services. You can do this by allowing port 443 outbound access to required cloud endpoints hosting those specific Azure services if your firewall supports url/domains. If it doesn't, you can retrieve the IP address ranges for these Azure services through service tags.
Azure File Sync requires the IP address ranges for the following services, as identified by their service tags:
| Service | Description | Service tag |
|---|---|---|
| Azure File Sync | The Azure File Sync service, as represented by the Storage Sync Service object, is responsible for the core activity of syncing data between an Azure file share and a Windows file server. | StorageSyncService |
| Azure Files | All data synchronized via Azure File Sync is stored in Azure file share. Files changed on your Windows file servers are replicated to your Azure file share, and files tiered on your on-premises file server are seamlessly downloaded when a user requests them. | Storage |
| Azure Resource Manager | The Azure Resource Manager is the management interface for Azure. All management calls, including Azure File Sync server registration and ongoing sync server tasks, are made through the Azure Resource Manager. | AzureResourceManager |
| Microsoft Entra ID | Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) contains the user principals required to authorize server registration against a Storage Sync Service, and the service principals required for Azure File Sync to be authorized to access your cloud resources. | AzureActiveDirectory |
If you're using Azure File Sync within Azure, even if it's in a different region, you can use the name of the service tag directly in your network security group to allow traffic to that service. To learn more, see Network security groups.
If you're using Azure File Sync on-premises, you can use the service tag API to get specific IP address ranges for your firewall's allowlist. There are two methods for getting this information:
- The current list of IP address ranges for all Azure services supporting service tags are published weekly on the Microsoft Download Center in the form of a JSON document.
- The service tag discovery API (preview) allows programmatic retrieval of the current list of service tags. In preview, the service tag discovery API may return information that's less current than information returned from the JSON documents published on the Microsoft Download Center. You can use the API surface based on your automation preference:
To learn more about how to use the service tag API to retrieve the addresses of your services, see Allowlist for Azure File Sync IP addresses.
Tunneling traffic over a virtual private network or ExpressRoute
Some organizations require communication with Azure to go over a network tunnel, such as a VPN or ExpressRoute, for an additional layer of security or to ensure communication with Azure follows a deterministic route.
When you establish a network tunnel between your on-premises network and Azure, you're peering your on-premises network with one or more virtual networks in Azure. A virtual network, or VNET, is similar to a traditional network that you'd operate on-premises. Like an Azure storage account or an Azure VM, a VNET is an Azure resource that is deployed in a resource group.
Azure Files and Azure File Sync support the following mechanisms to tunnel traffic between your on-premises servers and Azure:
Azure VPN Gateway: A VPN gateway is a specific type of virtual network gateway that is used to send encrypted traffic between an Azure virtual network and an alternate location (such as on-premises) over the internet. An Azure VPN Gateway is an Azure resource that can be deployed in a resource group along side of a storage account or other Azure resources. Because Azure File Sync is meant to be used with an on-premises Windows file server, you would normally use a Site-to-Site (S2S) VPN, although it is technically possible to use a Point-to-Site (P2S) VPN.
Site-to-Site (S2S) VPN connections connect your Azure virtual network and your organization's on-premises network. A S2S VPN connection enables you to configure a VPN connection once, for a VPN server or device hosted on your organization's network, rather than doing for every client device that needs to access your Azure file share. To simplify the deployment of a S2S VPN connection, see Configure a Site-to-Site (S2S) VPN for use with Azure Files.
ExpressRoute, which enables you to create a defined route (private connection) between Azure and your on-premises network that doesn't traverse the internet. Because ExpressRoute provides a dedicated path between your on-premises datacenter and Azure, ExpressRoute can be useful when network performance is a key consideration. ExpressRoute is also a good option when your organization's policy or regulatory requirements require a deterministic path to your resources in the cloud.
Private endpoints
In addition to the default public endpoints Azure Files and Azure File Sync provide through the storage account and Storage Sync Service, they provide the option to have one or more private endpoints per resource. This allows you to privately and securely connect to Azure file shares from on-premises using VPN or ExpressRoute and from within an Azure VNET. When you create a private endpoint for an Azure resource, it gets a private IP address from within the address space of your virtual network, much like how your on-premises Windows file server has an IP address within the dedicated address space of your on-premises network.
An individual private endpoint is associated with a specific Azure virtual network subnet. Storage accounts and Storage Sync Services may have private endpoints in more than one virtual network.
Using private endpoints enables you to:
- Securely connect to your Azure resources from on-premises networks using a VPN or ExpressRoute connection with private peering.
- Secure your Azure resources by disabling the public endpoints for Azure Files and File Sync. By default, creating a private endpoint doesn't block connections to the public endpoint.
- Increase security for the virtual network by enabling you to block exfiltration of data from the virtual network (and peering boundaries).
To create a private endpoint, see Configuring private endpoints for Azure File Sync.
Private endpoints and DNS
When you create a private endpoint, by default we also create (or update an existing) private DNS zone corresponding to the privatelink subdomain. For China cloud regions, these DNS zones are privatelink.file.core.chinacloudapi.cn for Azure Files and privatelink.afs.azure.cn for Azure File Sync.
When you create private endpoints for a storage account and a Storage Sync Service, we create A records for them in their respective private DNS zones. We also update the public DNS entry such that the regular fully qualified domain names are CNAMEs for the relevant privatelink name. This enables the fully qualified domain names to point at the private endpoint IP address(es) when the requester is inside of the virtual network and to point at the public endpoint IP address(es) when the requester is outside of the virtual network.
For Azure Files, each private endpoint has a single fully qualified domain name, following the pattern storageaccount.privatelink.file.core.chinacloudapi.cn, mapped to one private IP address for the private endpoint. For Azure File Sync, each private endpoint has four fully qualified domain names, for the four different endpoints that Azure File Sync exposes: management, sync (primary), sync (secondary), and monitoring. The fully qualified domain names for these endpoints will normally follow the name of the Storage Sync Service unless the name contains non-ASCII characters. For example, if your Storage Sync Service name is mysyncservice in the China East 2 region, the equivalent endpoints would be mysyncservicemanagement.chinaeast2.afs.azure.cn, mysyncservicesyncp.chinaeast2.afs.azure.cn, mysyncservicesyncs.chinaeast2.afs.azure.cn, and mysyncservicemonitoring.chinaeast2.afs.azure.cn. Each private endpoint for a Storage Sync Service will contain four distinct IP addresses.
Because your Azure private DNS zone is connected to the virtual network containing the private endpoint, you can observe the DNS configuration when by calling the Resolve-DnsName cmdlet from PowerShell in an Azure VM (alternately nslookup in Windows and Linux):
Resolve-DnsName -Name "storageaccount.file.core.chinacloudapi.cn"
For this example, the storage account storageaccount.file.core.chinacloudapi.cn resolves to the private IP address of the private endpoint, which happens to be 192.168.0.4.
Name Type TTL Section NameHost
---- ---- --- ------- --------
storageaccount.file.core.chinacloudapi.cn CNAME 29 Answer csostoracct.privatelink.file.core.chinacloudapi.cn
Name : storageaccount.privatelink.file.core.chinacloudapi.cn
QueryType : A
TTL : 1769
Section : Answer
IP4Address : 192.168.0.4
Name : privatelink.file.core.chinacloudapi.cn
QueryType : SOA
TTL : 269
Section : Authority
NameAdministrator : azureprivatedns-host.microsoft.com
SerialNumber : 1
TimeToZoneRefresh : 3600
TimeToZoneFailureRetry : 300
TimeToExpiration : 2419200
DefaultTTL : 300
If you run the same command from on-premises, you'll see that the same storage account name resolves to the public IP address of the storage account instead; storageaccount.file.core.chinacloudapi.cn is a CNAME record for storageaccount.privatelink.file.core.chinacloudapi.cn, which in turn is a CNAME record for the Azure storage cluster hosting the storage account:
Name Type TTL Section NameHost
---- ---- --- ------- --------
storageaccount.file.core.chinacloudapi.cn CNAME 60 Answer storageaccount.privatelink.file.core.chinacloudapi.cn
storageaccount.privatelink.file.core.chinacloudapi.cn CNAME 60 Answer file.par20prdstr01a.store.core.chinacloudapi.cn
Name : file.par20prdstr01a.store.core.chinacloudapi.cn
QueryType : A
TTL : 60
Section : Answer
IP4Address : 52.239.194.40
This reflects the fact that the Azure Files and Azure File Sync can expose both their public endpoints and one or more private endpoints per resource. To ensure that the fully qualified domain names for your resources resolve to the private endpoints private IP addresses, you must change the configuration on your on-premises DNS servers. This can be accomplished in several ways:
- Modifying the hosts file on your clients to make the fully qualified domain names for your storage accounts and Storage Sync Services resolve to the desired private IP addresses. This is strongly discouraged for production environments, since you'll need to make these changes to every client that needs to access your private endpoints. Changes to your private endpoints/resources (deletions, modifications, etc.) won't be automatically handled.
- Creating DNS zones on your on-premises servers for
privatelink.file.core.chinacloudapi.cnandprivatelink.afs.azure.cnwith A records for your Azure resources. This has the advantage that clients in your on-premises environment will be able to automatically resolve Azure resources without needing to configure each client. However, this solution is similarly brittle to modifying the hosts file because changes aren't reflected. Although this solution is brittle, it might be the best choice for some environments. - Forward the
core.chinacloudapi.cnandafs.azure.cnzones from your on-premises DNS servers to your Azure private DNS zone. The Azure private DNS host can be reached through a special IP address (168.63.129.16) that is only accessible inside virtual networks that are linked to the Azure private DNS zone. To workaround this limitation, you can run additional DNS servers within your virtual network that will forwardcore.chinacloudapi.cnandafs.azure.cnto the equivalent Azure private DNS zones. To simplify this configuration, we've provided PowerShell cmdlets that will auto-deploy DNS servers in your Azure virtual network and configure them as desired. To learn how to set up DNS forwarding, see Configuring DNS with Azure Files.
Encryption in transit
Connections made from the Azure File Sync agent to your Azure file share or Storage Sync Service are always encrypted. Although Azure storage accounts have a setting to disable requiring encryption in transit for communications to Azure Files (and the other Azure storage services that are managed out of the storage account), disabling this setting won't affect Azure File Sync's encryption when communicating with Azure Files. By default, all Azure storage accounts have encryption in transit enabled.
For more information about encryption in transit, see requiring secure transfer in Azure storage.