Question

You manage a Standard public Load Balancer that fronts a backend pool of 20 VMs. The VMs open a high volume of connections to a single external SaaS API endpoint (one destination IP and port), and you are seeing intermittent connection failures during peak load. You suspect SNAT port exhaustion. You want to guarantee each VM receives a large, predictable allocation of SNAT ports specifically for this outbound traffic without changing the inbound load-balancing rules. Which action should you take?

Accepted Answer

Create an explicit outbound rule on the Load Balancer and manually configure the number of allocated SNAT ports per instance.

Answer

Enable the 'Use outbound SNAT' option on the existing inbound load-balancing rule and rely on default port allocation.

Answer

Add additional frontend public IP addresses and let the platform automatically distribute default SNAT ports across them.

Answer

Switch the Load Balancer from Standard to Basic SKU to increase the default SNAT port pool per VM.