title: Azure VMs Virtual Network inter-communication
body: <p>I'm new to Azure (strike 1) and totally suck at networking (strike 2).</p>
  
  <p>Nevertheless, I've got two VMs up and running in the same virtual network; one will act as a web server and the other will act as a SQL database server.</p>
  
  <p>While I can see that their internal IP addresses are both in the same network I'm unable to verify that the machines can communicate with each other and am sort of confused regarding the appropriate place to address this.  </p>
  
  <p>Microsoft's own documentation says </p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>All virtual machines that you create in Windows Azure can
    automatically communicate using a private network channel with other
    virtual machines in the same cloud service or <strong>virtual network</strong>.
    However, you need to add an endpoint to a machine for other resources
    on the Internet or other virtual networks to communicate with it. You
    can associate specific ports and a protocol to endpoints. Resources
    can connect to an endpoint by using a protocol of TCP or UDP. The TCP
    protocol includes HTTP and HTTPS communication.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>So why can't the machines at least ping each other via internal IPs?  Is it Windows Firewall getting in the way? I'm starting to wonder if I've chose the wrong approach for a simple web server/database server setup.  Please forgive my ignorance.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.</p>