ExpressRouteDirect Connectivity question

Hello @Antonio ,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A Platform. Thank you for reaching out & hope you are doing well.

I understand you've some questions related to ExpressRoute Direct Connectivity. I've answered them below:

Q. If we create the Express Route Direct connection under the 'France Central' region and the peering location is 'Interxion-Madrid-MAD1'. Can we later access the 'Azure Storage France Central' services in France using Microsoft Peering and route filters or the peering location must be France to access that storage?

As mentioned in the ExpressRoute Direct documentation,

Azure ExpressRoute allows you to extend your on-premises network into the Microsoft cloud over a private connection made possible through a connectivity provider. With ExpressRoute, you can establish connections to Microsoft cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft 365. Each peering location has access to the Microsoft global network and can access any region in a geopolitical zone by default. You can access any global regions when you set up a premium circuit. The functionality in most scenarios is equivalent to circuits that use an ExpressRoute service provider to operate. To support further granularity and new capabilities offered using ExpressRoute Direct, there are certain key capabilities that exist only with ExpressRoute Direct circuits.

So, if you take a look at the Azure regions to ExpressRoute locations within a geopolitical region list, you will see Madrid location supporting the below Azure regions:

France Central is one of the Azure regions in the list. So, if your peering location is Madrid and you've selected the Standard SKU when creating a circuit in the ExpressRoute Direct resource, you can access any region in Europe Geopolitical region. Meaning all the above listed regions are accessible from Madrid peering location.

Refer: https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/azure/expressroute/how-to-expressroute-direct-portal#circuit

https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/azure/expressroute/expressroute-locations-providers#locations

If you selected the Premium SKU, you will be able to access any global regions.

If you selected Local SKU, then only West Europe region will be available. See the screenshot below:

Refer: https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/azure/expressroute/expressroute-locations-providers#global-commercial-azure

Q. To receive the Azure Storage public IP prefixes, our connectivity provider (GTT) will setup a BGP peering with Azure. Over this BGP peering they will advertise the public IPs that we use but belong to Orange (our local ISP). Is there any issue if GTT, using its ASN 3257, advertises to Azure Orange public IP addressing that belong to other ASN?

When creating Microsoft peering, Microsoft verifies if the specified 'Advertised public prefixes' and 'Peer ASN' (or 'Customer ASN') are assigned to you in the Internet Routing Registry. If you are getting the public prefixes from another entity and if the assignment is not recorded with the routing registry, the automatic validation will not complete and will require manual validation. If the automatic validation fails, you will see the message 'Validation needed'.

If you see Validation needed, collect documents that show your public prefixes are assigned to your organization by the entity that is listed as the owner of the prefixes in the routing registry. Then submit these documents for manual validation by opening a support ticket.

Refer: https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/azure/expressroute/expressroute-howto-routing-portal-resource-manager#msft

https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/azure/expressroute/expressroute-faqs#why-does-the-advertised-public-prefixes-status-show-validation-needed-while-configuring-microsoft-peering

Kindly let us know if the above helps or you need further assistance on this issue.

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