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Azure Lab Services Blog
3 MIN READ

Updates for Azure Lab Services

planetmaher's avatar
planetmaher
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Apr 25, 2022

The product team has been busy working on fundamental improvements for the service to boost performance, reliability, and scalability. It has been a multi-quarter effort, and we’re excited to announce all the great changes now available! We have a bunch of exciting new features, so let’s walk through all the goodness one by one.

 

Lab plans replace lab accounts. The lab account concept is being replaced with a new concept called a lab plan. Although similar in functionality, there are some fundamental differences between the two concepts. The lab plan serves as a collection of settings that apply to the labs created from it. Also, labs are now an Azure resource and a sibling resource to lab plans.

 

Canvas Integration. Now, instructors don’t have to leave Canvas to create their labs. Students can connect to a virtual machine from inside their course.

 

Per customer assigned capacity. No more sharing capacity with others. If your organization has requested more quota, Azure Lab Services will save it just for you.

 

Virtual network injection. Virtual network peering is replaced by virtual network injection. In your own subscription, create a virtual network in the same region as the lab plan and delegate a subnet to Azure Lab Services. Lab plans with advanced networking (i.e., vnet injection) will cause labs to create VMs attached to your virtual network.

 

Improved auto-shutdown. Auto-shutdown settings are now available for all operating systems!

 

More built-in roles. Previously, there was only the Lab Creator built-in role. We’ve added a few more roles including Lab Operator and Lab Assistant. Lab operators can manage existing labs, but not create new ones. Lab assistants can only help students by starting, stopping, or redeploying virtual machines. Lab assistants can't adjust quota or set schedules.

 

Improved cost tracking in Azure Cost Management. Lab virtual machines are now the cost unit tracked in Azure Cost Management. Tags for lab plan ID and lab name are automatically added to each cost entry. If you want to track the cost of a single lab, group the lab VM cost entries together by the lab name tag. Custom tags on labs will also propagate to Azure Cost Management entries to allow further cost analysis.

 

Updates to lab owner experience. Now you can choose to skip the template creation process when creating a new lab if you already have an image ready to use. We’ve also added the ability to add a non-admin user to lab VMs.

 

Updates to student experience. Students can now redeploy their VM without losing data. We also updated the registration experience for some scenarios. A lab VM is assigned to students automatically if the lab is set up to use Azure AD group sync, Teams, or Canvas.

SDKs. The Azure Lab Services PowerShell is now be integrated with the Az PowerShell module. Also, check out the C# SDK.

 

Give it a try!

 

In this release, there are a few known issues:

  • When using virtual network injection, use caution in making changes to the virtual network and subnet. Changes may cause the lab VMs to stop working. For example, deleting your virtual network will cause all the lab VMs to stop working. We plan to improve this experience in the future, but for now make sure to delete labs before deleting networks.
  • Moving lab plan and lab resources from one Azure region to another isn't supported.
  • There is a known race condition when a student tries to perform and action on a VM immediately after shutdown is triggered because auto-shutdown on disconnect (with grace period of 0 minutes) is enabled.  Students should wait they see the VM status show 'stopped' before performing any actions.
  • Azure Compute resource provider must be registered before Azure Lab Services can create and attach an Azure Compute Gallery resource.

 

We hope you enjoy all the new features! Look for more in-depth blog posts coming soon. For now, check out our updated documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/lab-services

 

Thanks,

  • Azure Lab Services Team
Updated Jun 20, 2024
Version 2.0

10 Comments

  • Hi Masih17,

     

    Thanks for reaching out – yes, there is currently a partial outage with Lab Services April 2022 Public Preview (Lab Plans).  The product team has been heavily engaged since we first started to see a service-wide issue.  We definitely understand that this is disruptive but I wanted to let you know that the team is doing everything they can to mitigate the outage.

     

    We are continuing to actively investigate and make targeted fixes, we continue to track this closely (through the weekend). We are already starting to see a trend in the right direction (queues are shortening) and will continue to track this until the outage has been fully mitigated. We will follow up with a root cause analysis once we have fully resolved the outage.

     

    For your other question on using Labs to host on your own hardware – we don’t currently support this but I’ll let the team know of your request.

     

    Thanks,

    Pete

  • Masih17's avatar
    Masih17
    Copper Contributor

    Hi,

    I understood that there is an outage with the V2 of the Lab Services, "Lab Plans". That is a very inconvenient situation and makes us worried because our organisation is relying on the service in the Autumn semester.

    We have a data centre in our school, and I'm wondering if there is any way that Microsoft could host our Labs on our own hardware?

    It would also be nice if you could provide an error message regarding this issue in the Labs Portal so customers would immediately know what the problem is.

    Thank you!

     

    Regards,
    Masih

  • Hi Masih-

     

    For the April Public Preview, you will need to go through the process of requesting capacity for your subscription so that you specify the region(s), VM size(s), and number of cores that you need assigned to your subscription for each VM size.  If you've already gone through this process for the April Public Preview and you still don't see VM sizes enabled to select for your region, then I recommend logging a support ticket to have the engineering team to investigate further to see if there is another issue causing this.

     

    One other point I want to mention, is that the Small GPU Visualization size is currently only supported for Windows, as shown in this table: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/lab-services/administrator-guide#vm-sizing.  If you select an Linux image, you will see that the Small GPU Visualization size is disabled.

     

    Thanks,

    Nicole

     

  • Masih17's avatar
    Masih17
    Copper Contributor

    nicolehaugen 

     

    Hi, I'm just trying to make sure I understood the situation before opening a ticket. 

     

    My Lab Plan located in North Europe doesn't give me any option for selecting a size. I have selected a Ubuntu 20.04 as the image.

    Our subscription has many cores available.

     

    Regards,

    Masih 

  • The VM sizes that you see greyed out by default can vary depending on the type of subscription that you have combined with the region that you have selected.  I recommend that you log a support ticket following the above steps so that the engineering team can ensure that you have sufficient capacity assigned based on your subscription type and region.

     

    Thanks,

    Nicole

  • Thanks Nicole, I was also wondering why the other (smaller) SKU's are greyed out? There is only one SKU available and that one still needs a limit increase. 

  • nicolehaugen 

    We only see a GPU sized SKU available, but for that one we need to request a limit increase:

    The other SKU's are unavailable (greyed out)

    Our region is Western Europe.

  • Hi Masih-

     

    The public preview is available across all regions.

     

    With the public preview, by default, your subscription is only given a small number of cores for each of the non-GPU sizes.  To use GPU sizes, you will need to fill out a support ticket to request a limit increase.  Here is more information about this: Capacity limits in Azure Lab Services - Azure Lab Services | Microsoft Docs

     

    Please let us know if you still have questions.

     

    Thanks for reaching out!

    Nicole

     

     

     

  • masih-shek's avatar
    masih-shek
    Copper Contributor

    Hi,

     

    The Market Place offers only medium and large image sizes.

    In the North Europe region, I get 0 of 0 NVv4 vCPU available and I must ask for a limit increase.

     

    Is the Lab Plan preview not available in North Europe?

     

    Regards,

    Masih