What is the Hybrid Connection Manager?

The Hybrid Connections feature requires a relay agent in the network that hosts your Hybrid Connection endpoint. That relay agent is called the Hybrid Connection Manager (HCM).

This tool runs on Windows Server 2012 and later. The HCM runs as a service and connects outbound to Azure Relay on port 443.

After installing HCM, you can run HybridConnectionManagerUi.exe to use the UI for the tool. This file is in the Hybrid Connection Manager installation directory. In Windows 10, you can also just search for Hybrid Connection Manager UI in your search box.

When you start the HCM UI, the first thing you see is a table that lists all the Hybrid Connections that are configured with this instance of the HCM.

To add one or more Hybrid Connections to your HCM:

Start the HCM UI.
Select Configure another Hybrid Connection.

3. Select Enter Manually in the HCM, and paste in the gateway connection string provided.

4. Select Save.

You can now see the Hybrid Connections you added. You can also select the configured Hybrid Connection to see details.

Redundancy

Each HCM can support multiple Hybrid Connections. Also, any given Hybrid Connection can be supported by multiple HCMs. The default behavior is to route traffic across the configured HCMs for any given endpoint. If you want high availability on your Hybrid Connections from your network, run multiple HCMs on separate machines. The load distribution algorithm used by the Relay service to distribute traffic to the HCMs is random assignment.