Through a general audit of our Azure environment, we found two VM's in our production system that have public IP's assigned. The Network Security Groups had already been configured to be very restrictive (limited to just inbound from an existing VNET), but I'd still like to remove the public IP address since we don't need it.
As mentioned, these are currently running production VM's and I'd like to remove the IP ASAP. Will removing the public IP address from the NIC cause any interruptions on the VM? I doubt it would need a reboot or anything, I just want to make sure I'm causing little to no disruption in the network traffic (this VM is hosting a database).
Best Answer
if your NSG is already restricted to azure Vnets then removing the Public IP should have no impact on the VM's.
remember that the RDP from external is also done via the Public IP unless you have a site to site VPN you might be locked out of RDP admin.
I have done this a few times and did not notice any issues. but to be safe i would also do it at a low period of network activity as the Virtual NIC might restart during the process.