Unmetered Bandwidth to Servers Australia Network

One of the benefits of using Virtual Data Centre (VDC) is our unmetered bandwidth offering.

All VDC's are provisioned with two NSX edges:

• Primary edge, which is for "normal" internet facing traffic. All traffic passing out via this edge is billable.
• "sau-unmetered" edge.  All traffic passing via this NSX edge is unmetered (not billable).

By routing traffic via the "sau-unmetered" NSX edge, you can get fully unlimited and unmetered bandwidth to any other IP Address on the Servers Australia network. 

Some common use cases for this would be:

• Unmetered bandwidth to other services you may have with us, e.g. Dedicated Servers or Cloud Servers.
• Unmetered bandwidth to our storage platform, so you are not charged for any storage bandwidth. e.g. S3 Compatible Object Storage, RBD, CephFS, NFS, SMB.

The Unmetered NSX Edge Gateway

You can see the unmetered NSX edge by navigating to Networking -> Edges. 

This gateway is pre-configured to allow all traffic, and also has a default SNAT rule configured, so you don't need to configure it at all. 

So now you know where the edge is found, although you shouldn't need to make any changes there in most cases.

The Unmetered Org Network

The second piece of the puzzle is the 'sau-unmetered' Org network. 

This is the network you'll need to attach to your virtual machines to use the unmetered connection.

You can find this network under the Networking -> Networks section. 

It will be preconfigured with 10.0.0.1/24 as the gateway. 

For each VM that requires unmetered bandwidth, you need to complete the following steps:

• Attach the sau-unmetered org network to the VM
• Configure the network adapter inside the VM with an IP in the 10.0.0.0/24 range
• Create a static route on the VM for the IP addresses you need unmetered traffic to, via the unmetered gateway IP (10.0.0.1).

The below example shows the steps in more detail. In this example, we want unmetered access to the Servers Australia S3 compatible storage platform from one of our Linux virtual machines, running Ubuntu 22.04.

Confirm that the IP address you want unmetered traffic to is actually a Servers Australia IP address.

To do this, the easy way is to run a 'whois' lookup on the IP address. 

So let's find the IP addresses we want to get unmetered bandwidth to, and then check they are "SAU" IPs.

dig a s3.si.servercontrol.com.au +short
27.50.66.227
27.50.66.226

We found the IPs with dig, now let's check the whois on them:

whois 27.50.66.227 | grep descr
descr:          Servers Australia Pty Ltd
descr:          Servers Australia Pty. Ltd

Attach the unmetered org network to the VM

Click the VM name you want to attach the unmetered network to

Click on 'NICs' then 'edit'.

Then "add vapp network".

Then select OrgVDC Network, select the unmetered org network, and click add.

Now select 'new', set the network to the sau-unmetered network, and set the ip mode to 'static - ip pool'.

Then click save

Give it a few seconds to add the NIC to the VM. Once complete, you'll see which IP address has been assigned to the NIC.

Configure the unmetered network IP address on the network adapter.

Once you configure the IP address on your interface, make sure you can ping the unmetered gateway IP (10.0.0.1) like in the below screenshot:

Now that we know we can ping the unmetered gateway, we can start creating static routes for specific IP addresses, to go via the unmetered gateway.

Create static routes

The steps to create static routes will vary wildly depending on which operating system you're using. 

You can use the following guides as a reference to see how to create static routes inside your O.S:

CentOS 7

https://docs.serversaustralia.com.au/v1/docs/create-a-static-route-in-centos-7-for-unmetered-bandwidth-to-the-storage-platform

Windows

https://docs.serversaustralia.com.au/v1/docs/create-a-static-route-in-windows-for-unmetered-bandwidth-to-the-storage-platform

Ubuntu 18 and newer:

https://docs.serversaustralia.com.au/v1/docs/create-a-static-route-in-ubuntu-1804-or-newer

If your O.S. is not listed here, simply Google how to create static routes for your specific operating system. In this guide we'll create a temporary static route to show you how it works and how to validate that traffic is actually going out via the unmetered gateway.

We want to create static routes to the following SAU IP addresses for S3 Compatible storage traffic:

27.50.66.227/32

27.50.66.226/32

And we need to make sure that the traffic for these IPs goes via the storage gateway 10.0.0.1.

Creating the temporary static route:

Once you've created your static routes (Again, make sure you do a permanent static route. This guide only shows how to do a temporary one for demonstration purposes) you'll want to use both 'ping' and 'traceroute' (or tracepath, or tracert depending on your OS) command to ensure that traffic is going via 10.0.0.1 for these IPs.

First use ping to ensure you can actually reach the IP address, and then check traceroute to ensure it's taking the correct path via the unmetered gateway. You want to ensure that the first hop on the traceroute is 10.0.0.1.

And there you have it! 

Now all traffic from this VM to 27.50.66.227 and 27.50.66.226 (s3 compatible storage endpoints, in this case) will be 100% free and unmetered from the VDC side!

If you have any issues creating a static route inside your O.S. you can always reach out to our helpful support team for further assistance.