MicrosoftYou seem to have been following ALS for much longer than me, do you know where the key people involved hang out? You're actually the first person to respond so far, the feedback site and UserVoice only appear to have sporadic responses, and I couldn't find anybody on twitter. I would love to have a more direct way to talk to the team, as this product definitely fits the bill for me aside from the low storage space.
I was thinking of writing a blog post giving all the tips and tricks I learned along the way, but with the storage space issue, my final recommendation would be that is that it can only be used for a lab of 4 VMs maximum, if you used all the tricks in the book to save space.
As for the rest, you have probably gone through the same process I did, and figured out ways to transfer large files onto the template VM *other* than over RDP which is way too slow. Because I didn't know that you had to create the virtual network *before* the lab to attach a lab to a virtual network, I pretty much got to where I wanted after the 3rd lab created from scratch. You definitely need at last one "lab controller VM" to transfer files more easily to the template VM.
The thing is that even though the workflow ALS enforced appears relatively simple, I don't have the time to make a DIY equivalent, especially for cost control, easy duplication and sharing of the lab VMs. Have you found the equivalent Azure VM SKUs for the instances offered through ALS? I'm particularly interested in the 8 core, 32GB RAM + nested virtualization instance.
This being said, due to my strong background in RDP through the FreeRDP project and what I'm working on these days at Devolutions with Wayk Bastion, there are a few things I could offer to the ALS team to improve secure external RDP connectivity. We have an open source Remote Desktop Gateway replacement (Devolutions Gateway) that does relaying at the TCP-level and accepts a JWT instead of doing the heavyweight RD Gateway protocol, it would be a whole lot better than using the current RDP dynamic range of ports. We are also about to adapt it for SSH access, so it would be usable for that as well in the future.
Are you aware of anyone building their own Azure Lab Services replacement with a similar type of workflow, with a single template VM efficiently duplicated for a large number of students, with good enough cost control to reduce waste to a minimum? Azure VMs have an auto-shutdown feature, but that's once per day, for instances that cost 1$ per hour that's just too much waste if students forget it for a couple of hours. If you've got links to blog posts that cover parts of the puzzle, like how to deal with the disk duplication easily for Azure VMs, I'm all ears.
To conclude, I'd be curious to learn more about your use case, as we may be able to share tips.
