Forum Discussion
VM Disk Size
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.
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.
MicrosoftAndrewStrahl currently the only other options I can think of would be to store the snapshots externally from the VM. Or, the other thought is to create multiple labs for the class so that the students use a different lab\VM depending on the set of assignments that they are working on. I realize that neither of these are ideal, but may be ways to work around this in the short term.
We have received this feedback before that for nested virtualization, a larger disk size than 128 GB would be useful. I'll make sure your feedback is tracked on our backlog to consider for the future.
- We thought of attaching a storage share in the VNet for students to store snapshots. This is fairly new for us (just learned of lab services two weeks ago) so we are still figuring out what works and what won't.
We won't give up, I'm sure we can find something that will work.
Gotta admit though, this is such a game changer for us during covid!- nicolehaugen
AndrewStrahl glad to hear that Az Labs is helping out. If your school needs any assistance with setting up labs based on the various needs of your classes, please let us know. We can potentially engage with your school\IT department directly to help implement this.
Also, we really appreciate your feedback. I would be interested to know what option you decide to go with to work around the 128 GB size limitation. And, we're always interested to learn more about the types of classes\scenarios that schools are using Az Labs for.
Thanks,
Nicole
- I haven't tried this yet but since the VMs can be peered there's no reason they couldn't access a storage device in the same Vnet network.
- I have never tried using some sort of network storage for Hyper-V virtual machines, but if you have good references (docs, blog posts, etc) I'm willing to take a look at it. However, this would only really be usable for read-only resources shared by all VMs: if everybody has a fully copy of the template VM, external shared storage doesn't duplicate itself. Each student gets a fully isolated copy of the template VM to play with, anything stored externally unfortunately breaks the isolation.
