Forum Discussion
tdickieson
May 06, 2020Copper Contributor
VM Disk Size
Hi Folks! I'm curious if there is a way to increase the default disk size or add additional disks for Lab VMs? Some of our software packages are quite large! I haven't seem mention of this in th...
- May 26, 2020
tdickieson - One thing that I want to point out is that there is a general paradigm shift when you switch from a physical lab to using Azure Lab Services. A key difference is that Azure Lab Services is designed to spin up and tear down labs quickly as your needs change - typically, we recommend that you have 1 lab per class so that you only need to install the software for that one particular class and then when the class is over, you tear it down again. This is different compared to a physical lab that is shared by multiple classes and that requires all classes' software be installed at the same time. In most cases, if you create 1 lab per class, this typically reduces the amount of software that must be installed at one time within the lab and then reduces disk size needs. However, there are sometimes exceptions that a particular piece of software requires a larger disk size - if you have this situation, let us know.
nicolehaugen
Microsoft
May 26, 2020tdickieson - One thing that I want to point out is that there is a general paradigm shift when you switch from a physical lab to using Azure Lab Services. A key difference is that Azure Lab Services is designed to spin up and tear down labs quickly as your needs change - typically, we recommend that you have 1 lab per class so that you only need to install the software for that one particular class and then when the class is over, you tear it down again. This is different compared to a physical lab that is shared by multiple classes and that requires all classes' software be installed at the same time. In most cases, if you create 1 lab per class, this typically reduces the amount of software that must be installed at one time within the lab and then reduces disk size needs. However, there are sometimes exceptions that a particular piece of software requires a larger disk size - if you have this situation, let us know.
- tdickiesonFeb 26, 2021Copper ContributorHi nicolehaugen!
Thanks for the response. I do understand the paradigm shift, and I'm all for it! I guess for one we do run into these "edge case" exceptions with very large software packages. Especially as some of these applications require a substantial data set to ingest or export and there insufficent space on the disk. I understand there are work arounds for this, which we are leveraging (i.e. file shares, blob storage, etc.). It's just that it would certainly be much more efficient in some cases to just have a slightly larger disk or ability to attach a second disk.
In the higher education context, another situation we run into is when one professor, teaching one course, requires multiple applications for remote instruction. We end up having to create multiple VMs for each student (even though they are in one course) and make sure the students use the correct VM per application. When they need to feed the output from one application as input for another application, well, you see how this starts to get overly complicated.
Again, I appreciate the response. We are using various work arounds right now. I just thought it might be helpful to just leave some feedback on our particular use cases as I figured there may be others in the same situation. Having the option would certainly help sell this solution to more audiences in our space. - AndrewStrahlNov 05, 2020Copper ContributorWith our environment, we will run anywhere from a single client up to 4 servers and 4 clients on a host. The 32gb of ram will handle it, but the 128gb space will limit the use of snapshots for students to use while doing their lab work.
- nicolehaugenNov 05, 2020
Microsoft
AndrewStrahl - Sure, this info helps me to understand your scenario. Although the current disk size is 128 GB, we did recently write a blog post that provides tips to help with nested virtualization. Here's a link to this post: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-lab-services/nested-virtualization-tips/ba-p/1534323. In particular, refer to the guidance provided in bullet #2 in this post.
Thanks,
Nicole
- AndrewStrahlNov 05, 2020Copper ContributorI think the default is to thin provision the disks (using vhdx).
For us it's not the size of the disk that is cuaing issues, just the ability to take multiple snapshots of each VM.
For example, if we have 6 VMs, and ten assignments for the class, they would need nine snapshots if they want to go back and practice.