Azure Lab Services topics

Suggestions for a replacement solution

TrevorHopkinsJBC — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:24:45 GMT

We are a small UK provider delivering IT apprenticeships and "Free Courses For Jobs". We have been using Azure Labs for a number of years to host instructional labs for our learners. We have found it to be of huge benefit to our learners in terms of allowing them to develop their IT Support and Engineering skills further by putting their knowledge into practice. The platform has been ideal for us, and we are experiencing difficulties finding an alternative solution. DevTest Labs lacks a lot of the functionality we need (the ability to limit learners to a number of hours use of a particular lab vm for example). We have approached the Microsoft recommended partners, however they have all but said we are too small to be of commercial interest -our current Azure Lab spend varies from around £300pm to circa £700 per month. Wondering if any other providers have found themselves in a similar situation and if they have found any viable solutions? All suggestions welcome.

Guidance Needed: Using Azure Lab Services for AZ-104, AZ-700, AI & Cybersecurity Training

Ali_M1075 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 07:23:45 GMT

Hello everyone,

I’m planning several upcoming training programs (AZ-104, AZ-700, and other AI and cybersecurity–related certifications), and I’m considering using Azure Lab Services for the student labs.

I haven’t used Azure Lab Services before, so I’d really appreciate insights from anyone who has real experience with it. Specifically, I’d like to understand:

- Does each student receive their own individual login and lab environment?

- How much control does the instructor have over the virtual machines (start/stop, reset, limits, schedules)?

Is Azure Lab Services limited to VMs only, or can students also work with other Azure resources such as load balancers, firewalls, VNets, etc.?

- One of my key objectives is for students to learn how to build and deploy VMs themselves. Is this supported within Azure Lab Services, or is it more focused on pre-built lab environments?

- Students also should work with Entra ID, So create and manage users with RBAC. Is it covered?

From your experience, what is the approximate cost per student per month, and how manageable is cost control?

Any additional guidance, best practices, or lessons learned would be greatly appreciated.

Feel free to reply here or DM me if that’s easier.

Thank you in advance for your support.

Best regards,

Ali M.

We're moving to Microsoft Q&A!

planetmaher — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 18:52:37 GMT

Come join us at Azure Lab Services - Microsoft Q&A!

We will be moving away from this forum for community questions and start to focus our time on the central Microsoft Q & A platform. This forum will be archived in a couple of months, so please update your bookmarks to https://learn.microsoft.com/answers/tags/186/azure-lab-services. See you there!

To get the latest updates, subscribe to the Azure Lab Services Blog.

To read the documentation, visit the Azure Lab Services documentation.

For retirement guidance, visit the Azure Lab Services retirement guide.

Thanks,

The Azure Lab Services Team

An VM stuck in "creating"

pcai2010 — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:55:48 GMT

Hello,

After the outage issue this morning, one of the VMs in our labs has been stuck all day in the "Creating..." state. There is nothing I can do to affect it It is okay to delete that particular VM or reimage, but those options do not work for me. Any information would be appreciated.

Cannot start VMs, template, or create a new lab

anthonyparry-jones — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:55:41 GMT

We are currently seeing an issue where we cannot start our VMs, we just see this message: "Virtual machine redeploy operation failed. Try redeploying the virtual machine. If the issue persists, consider reimaging it. For further assistance submit a support request." Redeploying does not make any difference, and we are reluctant to reimage as MS have acknowledged a bug whereby the SSD of the VM can shrink after a reimage: in any case we also cannot start our template.

We cannot make a new lab: when we try we see the "gorilla holding a sign" indication that something has gone wrong on both the dashboard and template pages for that lab.

Our lab plan is based in UK South. We are unable to create an alternative lab plan in another region as the portal says we are not allowed to due the retirement of ALS in 2027!

Has anybody seen similar and has any suggestions?

I cannot set the lab capacity when publishing the template.

afshinmassah68 — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:55:34 GMT

Hello,

A lab has been created before, and its capacity is zero currently. When I publish the lab, there is no option to set the virtual machine capacity, so there is no VM. When I send the invitation link to a user, it says all VMs are claimed.... . Can someone help me with this issue?

Thanks.

Azure Lab Plan Core Increase Leading to 2027

Robert_Sudbury — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:55:27 GMT

With the recently announced shutdown of Azure Lab Services for 2027, and the blocking of creating NEW lab plans, will core quota increases still be available for existing lab plans?

AZURE LAB USER SQL DB DELETE EACH TIME I REPUBLISH

chiisom_okoye — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:55:21 GMT

@community

Good morning Community members,

I am having an issue, each time I republish the VM from the labs.azure.com portal the following happens:

the entire document and wipe off
the numerous installed app memory restarts ( e.g the extensions in VS code need to be reinstall)
the databases created by the users also clear off

Please, can you help me with a step-by-step guide to prevent this from happening?

I appreciate your help, dear community members.

LAB VM Hardening loosing connectivity

SomeRandomNPC — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:55:14 GMT

Hi, I need some help here,

I am working on a project on an AzureLab to automate the installation of a Privileged Access Management solution (CyberArk). The problem I am encountering is that the Vault VM (containing passwords) needs a drastic hardening.

Everything works until I restart the VM after the hardening process from AzureLAB (I am able to restart it from windows without a problem). The starting button never ends and after 10 minutes the VM is disconected. However, until those 10 minutes I am still able to use it as if it worked completly fine.

My only clue here is I suppose that AzureLAB uses behind the scenes a specific utility to check if the VM is actually started, wich is blocked by my hardening ?

Does anyone already encountered a similar problem ?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Unplanned Outage?

SophieRyan — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:55:08 GMT

Hi Lab Services team,

Are there any updates I can share with my affected users? Students have assignments due tomorrow (Monday 13/05, Australia East) and I'm having to tell the subject coordinators that they won't be able to hand them in. What are your current theories about the cause or estimates for a timeline?

Disk throughput performance differences between template and pool VM

surinameclubcard — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:55:02 GMT

Hi,

While testing a Lab I'm preparing, I noticed that the disk throughput performance of my template was as much as 5 times faster compared to a pooled VM from that very same template.

I'm using the "Large VM (nested virtualization)" template with the "128 GB Premium SSD" option.

The template itself reaches about 150 Mbyte/s, while the pool VM maxed out at 30 MByte/s.

The VM is running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. I'm testing as follows:

dd if=somebigVMfile.vdi of=/dev/null bs=1M status=progress

Is there something wrong with the pool VM? Anything it can/should/must do to change this? 30 Mbyte/s is way too slow for a "premium SSD".

Thank you!

Labs Backup and restore (whole lab)

NeoIT21 — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:54:48 GMT

Hi community!

I hope you can give me a hand.

We just started working with Azure lab services and we love the tool; but I haven't found a way to backup a lab, how could I do it? That is, if someone accidentally deletes a lab, is it possible to have a backup of that lab to restore it? I mean, not of the Virtual Machines, but a backup of the whole lab; or, at least, a backup of the customized and published imaged used to deploy the Virtual Machines

I would appreciate if you share any idea of how to do it; I have not found anything about this in the official documentation.

Thank you very much in advance!

Azure Lab Services - Planned Outage - April 19, 2024

agopinathan — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:54:56 GMT

Hello Everyone,

On April 19th, 2024, we will be updating our system between 1:00-10:00 pm UTC. Please expect downtime for most common operations like create/ update/ delete labs, start/stop virtual machines etc. The service will be available after the update. We will provide update on this post once the service update is complete. Thank you for your patience.

- Lab Services team.

Windows 10 image missing in Marketplace images

aleksandarpejic — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:47:57 GMT

When I browse Marketplace in portal.azure.com I can select Windows 10 just fine (and create a VM) but in azure lab services there is no Windows 10 image in "Marketplace Images". What am I missing?

Getting an error when trying to increase lab capacity?

TonyV333 — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:54:06 GMT

One goal but two issues. I've created a template and published it with a VM pool of three VMs in order to test the Template before finally publishing it for the class. I am now ready to do the final publication, but I am unable to increase the capacity of the lab to 25 VMs, or even increase it by 1. I get the error message "An error occurred while updating the lab capacity."

My second thought was to export it to the Azure Compute Gallery, and then just delete the old lab and create a new one with the appropriate number of VMs, but after selecting the Export option and waiting a day, I don't see where I can select the Template. It doesn't show up as an option when creating a new lab.

VMs not allocated

dwelbourn — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:54:42 GMT

Hi,

I'm building a lab for our networking module, and I've configured synchronization of users with a group. I added a handful of users to test, and under "Virtual machine pool" those users have a VM allocated and their status is "Registered".

I've now added all the users to the group, but the new users show as "Not registered" and no VM gets allocated. I thought that using sync to group meant users didn't need to be invited, and they could just login and get started? The total users is just over 200, so well within the 400 user limit.

Is there a limit on how many users can be added to the group in one go?

Thanks,

Dean

Hadoop on Azure labs

gina_cooper — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:42:54 GMT

Hello-

I'm working on installing Hadoop on the Azure lab environment. I have followed these steps:https://kontext.tech/column/hadoop/377/latest-hadoop-321-installation-on-windows-10-step-by-step-guide and am using this template:

Windows 10 Pro, Version 1909

Medium|4 cores|7GB RAM

I keep getting an error when I try to format the namenode and I can't figure it out. I'm wondering if anyone has had success installing hadoop on Azure lab. This is the error I'm getting

2020-10-13 18:07:46,044 INFO util.GSet: VM type = 64-bit
2020-10-13 18:07:46,046 INFO util.GSet: 0.029999999329447746% max memory 889 MB = 273.1 KB
2020-10-13 18:07:46,046 INFO util.GSet: capacity = 2^15 = 32768 entries
2020-10-13 18:07:46,220 INFO namenode.FSImage: Allocated new BlockPoolId: BP-2025207759-10.140.18.4-1602612466198
2020-10-13 18:07:46,375 WARN namenode.NameNode: Encountered exception during format:
ExitCodeException exitCode=-1073741515:
at org.apache.hadoop.util.Shell.runCommand(Shell.java:1008)
at org.apache.hadoop.util.Shell.run(Shell.java:901)
at org.apache.hadoop.util.Shell$ShellCommandExecutor.execute(Shell.java:1213)
at org.apache.hadoop.util.Shell.execCommand(Shell.java:1307)
at org.apache.hadoop.util.Shell.execCommand(Shell.java:1289)
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FileUtil.execCommand(FileUtil.java:1350)
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FileUtil.execSetPermission(FileUtil.java:1341)
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FileUtil.setPermission(FileUtil.java:1294)
at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.common.Storage$StorageDirectory.clearDirectory(Storage.java:456)
at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.NNStorage.format(NNStorage.java:591)
at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.NNStorage.format(NNStorage.java:613)
at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.FSImage.format(FSImage.java:188)
at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.NameNode.format(NameNode.java:1206)
at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.NameNode.createNameNode(NameNode.java:1649)
at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.NameNode.main(NameNode.java:1759)
2020-10-13 18:07:46,386 ERROR namenode.NameNode: Failed to start namenode.
ExitCodeException exitCode=-1073741515:
at org.apache.hadoop.util.Shell.runCommand(Shell.java:1008)
at org.apache.hadoop.util.Shell.run(Shell.java:901)
at org.apache.hadoop.util.Shell$ShellCommandExecutor.execute(Shell.java:1213)
at org.apache.hadoop.util.Shell.execCommand(Shell.java:1307)
at org.apache.hadoop.util.Shell.execCommand(Shell.java:1289)
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FileUtil.execCommand(FileUtil.java:1350)
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FileUtil.execSetPermission(FileUtil.java:1341)
at org.apache.hadoop.fs.FileUtil.setPermission(FileUtil.java:1294)
at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.common.Storage$StorageDirectory.clearDirectory(Storage.java:456)
at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.NNStorage.format(NNStorage.java:591)
at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.NNStorage.format(NNStorage.java:613)
at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.FSImage.format(FSImage.java:188)
at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.NameNode.format(NameNode.java:1206)
at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.NameNode.createNameNode(NameNode.java:1649)
at org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.NameNode.main(NameNode.java:1759)
2020-10-13 18:07:46,406 INFO util.ExitUtil: Exiting with status 1: ExitCodeException exitCode=-1073741515:
2020-10-13 18:07:46,418 INFO namenode.NameNode: SHUTDOWN_MSG:
/************************************************************
SHUTDOWN_MSG: Shutting down NameNode at ML-RefVm-145321/10.140.18.4
************************************************************/

Accessing Azure Lab Service REST APIs

girithart — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:54:35 GMT

Hello Community Members!

I'm trying to call the following Azure REST API from Postman:

GET https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/resourceGroups/{resourceGroupName}/providers/Microsoft.LabServices/labs/{labName}/virtualMachines/{virtualMachineName}?api-version=2022-08-01

These are the steps I followed:
01. I created an Azure Active Directory and then registered an app with 'App registrations'
02. In the new app, navigated to 'API permissions', clicked on the 'Add a permission' button and added the 'Azure Service Management'(https://management.azure.com/)
03. Created an Azure lab plan in the https://portal.azure.com/
04. Created a lab by navigating to https://labs.azure.com/
05. In the Postman, I generated an access_token by issuing a POST request at: https://login.microsoftonline.com/<tenant-id>/oauth2/token

grant_type: client_credentials
client_secret: <from the app registered above>
client_id: <from the app registered above>
resource: https://management.azure.com/

06. Issued a GET request with the 'Bearer Token' Authorization header at: https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/<subscription id>/resourceGroups/<resource grp>/providers/Microsoft.LabServices/labs/<lab>/virtualMachines/template?api-version=2022-08-01

07. Got the following '403 Forbidden' response:
{
"error": {
"code": "AuthorizationFailed",
"message": "The client '74e88316-ceec-4878-8d62-b765318ef01b' with object id '74e88316-ceec-4878-8d62-b765318ef01b' does not have authorization to perform action 'Microsoft.LabServices/labs/virtualMachines/read' over scope '/subscriptions/<subscription id>/resourceGroups/<resource grp>/providers/Microsoft.LabServices/labs/<lab>/virtualMachines/template' or the scope is invalid. If access was recently granted, please refresh your credentials."
}
}

It looks like some configuration is missing from my setup. Any input/thoughts are very much appreciated. Thanks.

Regards,

Giri

Integrating Azure Lab Services with MoodleCloud

girithart — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:54:30 GMT

I'm planning to deliver a few courses to my students via the MoodleCloud LMS. The course has a lab exercise component, for which I'm planning to use the Azure Lab Services. My students should be able to launch the lab from the MoodleCloud. To that end, I'm considering the integration options that I have at my disposal. I'm particularly interested in the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) integration. I learn that LTI is a standard-based integration mechanism and it has been supported by many LMS, including MoodleCloud. These are my questions:

Does Azure Lab Services support LTI integration?
What other integration options do I have?

Any input/thoughts are highly appreciated. Thanks.

Expected VM Operation Interruption

RajaHarishVempati — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:54:24 GMT

Hello Everyone,

On July 5th, 2023, we will be updating our system between 7:00-8:00 pm UTC. This will cause issues when starting, stopping and creating virtual machines. The service will be available after the update.

This would impact only virtual machines that are part of a Lab, created under 'Lab Accounts'. If you have labs created under 'Lab Plans', no impact is expected. Will provide update on this post once the service update is complete.

-Lab Services team.