Create an AWS Direct Connect private virtual interface

You can provision a private virtual interface to a virtual private gateway in the same Region as your AWS Direct Connect connection. For more information about provisioning a private virtual interface to an AWS Direct Connect gateway, see AWS Direct Connect gateways.

If you use the VPC wizard to create a VPC, route propagation is automatically enabled for you. With route propagation, routes are automatically populated to the route tables in your VPC. If you choose, you can disable route propagation. For more information, see Enable Route Propagation in Your Route Table in the Amazon VPC User Guide.

The maximum transmission unit (MTU) of a network connection is the size, in bytes, of the largest permissible packet that can be passed over the connection. The MTU of a virtual private interface can be either 1500 or 9001 (jumbo frames). The MTU of a transit virtual interface can be either 1500 or 8500 (jumbo frames). You can specify the MTU when you create the interface or update it after you create it. Setting the MTU of a virtual interface to 8500 (jumbo frames) or 9001 (jumbo frames) can cause an update to the underlying physical connection if it wasn't updated to support jumbo frames. Updating the connection disrupts network connectivity for all virtual interfaces associated with the connection for up to 30 seconds. To check whether a connection or virtual interface supports jumbo frames, select it in the AWS Direct Connect console and find Jumbo Frame Capable on the Summary tab.

To provision a private virtual interface to a VPC

1. Open the AWS Direct Connect console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/directconnect/v2/home.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Virtual Interfaces.

3. Choose Create virtual interface.

4. Under Virtual interface type, choose Private.

5. Under Private virtual interface settings, do the following:

   1. For Virtual interface name, enter a name for the virtual interface.

   2. For Connection, choose the Direct Connect connection that you want to use for this interface.

   3. For Virtual interface owner, choose My AWS account if the virtual interface is for your AWS account.

   4. For Direct Connect gateway, select the Direct Connect gateway.

   5. For VLAN, enter the ID number for your virtual local area network (VLAN).

   6. For BGP ASN, enter the Border Gateway Protocol Autonomous System Number of your on-premises peer router for the new virtual interface.

      The valid values are 1 to 2147483647.

6. Under Additional Settings, do the following:

   1. To configure an IPv4 BGP or an IPv6 peer, do the following:

      [IPv4] To configure an IPv4 BGP peer, choose IPv4 and do one of the following:

      • To specify these IP addresses yourself, for Your router peer ip, enter the destination IPv4 CIDR address to which Amazon should send traffic.

      • For Amazon router peer ip, enter the IPv4 CIDR address to use to send traffic to AWS.

        Important

        If you let AWS auto-assign IPv4 addresses, a /29 CIDR will be allocated from 169.254.0.0/16 IPv4 Link-Local according to RFC 3927 for point-to-point connectivity. AWS does not recommend this option if you intend to use the customer router peer IP address as the source and/or destination for VPC traffic. Instead you should use RFC 1918 or other addressing (non-RFC 1918), and specify the address yourself.

        • For more information about RFC 1918, see Address Allocation for Private Internets.

        • For more information about RFC 3927, see Dynamic Configuration of IPv4 Link-Local Addresses.

      [IPv6] To configure an IPv6 BGP peer, choose IPv6. The peer IPv6 addresses are automatically assigned from Amazon's pool of IPv6 addresses. You cannot specify custom IPv6 addresses.

   2. To change the maximum transmission unit (MTU) from 1500 (default) to 9001 (jumbo frames), select Jumbo MTU (MTU size 9001).

   3. (Optional) Under Enable SiteLink, choose Enabled to enable direct connectivity between Direct Connect points of presence.

   4. (Optional) Add or remove a tag.

      [Add a tag] Choose Add tag and do the following:

      • For Key, enter the key name.

      • For Value, enter the key value.

      [Remove a tag] Next to the tag, choose Remove tag.

7. Choose Create virtual interface.

8. Download the router configuration for your device. For more information, see Download the router configuration file.

To create a private virtual interface using the command line or API

• create-private-virtual-interface (AWS CLI)

• CreatePrivateVirtualInterface (AWS Direct Connect API)