To establish a standalone physical connection on your own, you must apply for a dedicated physical connection interface from Alibaba Cloud. The third-party service provider must perform a site survey and install a leased line. The whole connection process can take two to three months. Therefore, we recommend that you prepare the budget and connection plan in advance.

Process overview

To establish a standalone physical connection on your own, you must:

  1. Prepare the connection information.

    Before you apply for a physical connection, you must obtain the detailed location of the access point and available resources, ask the service provider to perform a site survey, and get a price quote. For more information, see Before you begin.

  2. Apply for and enable a physical connection interface.

    This process involves operations of the customer, service provider, and Alibaba Cloud. The console displays the required operations and connection states at all stages.

  3. Create a Virtual Border Router (VBR) to connect the on-premises data center to an Alibaba Cloud VPC.
The leased line installation process varies according to the network topology. The following two figures show the cable connections required to install a leased line for two commonly used network topologies. Consult your service provider for the actual network topology.
  • The following figure shows the cable connections required when the on-premises data center and the Alibaba access point are located in different data center parks.
  • The following figure shows the cable connections required when the on-premises data center and the Alibaba Cloud access point are located in the same data center park.

Physical connection states

During the process of establishing an exclusive physical connection, you can check the progress by viewing the application status of the physical connection interface in the console.

Note The states shown in the following figure are all displayed in the Express Connect console except the In construction by service provider state.

Procedure

For more information about the operations of establishing an exclusive physical connection, see Created a dedicated physical connection.