Lab Services
Azure Lab Services is a service that enables you to easily set up and provide on-demand access to various systems and software for any workload: teaching a class, setting up a development or test environment, or running trials with customers. Manage and scale your group’s resources in lab environments, while minimizing waste and controlling cost. Choose between the two lab types, classroom lab or devtest lab, for an experience that is tailored to your scenario.
Visit the Azure Lab Services page to learn more.
-
51 votes
-
Provide the ability to customise the Classroom Labs user Portal
It would be great to be able to customise the User portal for the Classroom labs, maybe per classroom lab basis, where we can establish a nice workshop title banner, do custom branding etc.
20 votesThank you for your suggestion. We added this to our feature backlog.
-
14 votes
Can you please elaborate on this scenario? If we provide an option to change the sku size (ex. change small to medium/large or vice versa), would that suffice?
-
14 votes
-
Make template VM directly accessible in Azure portal
The template VM should be accessible like a regular VM via the Azure Portal. I got into a situation after configuring the firewall where the RDP port was blocked and could no longer access it. Support could not resolve it either. This would alleviate that by allowing normal Azure recovery methods.
10 votes -
Allow ability to Rename labs
Once you deploy a lab there is no way to change the name of the lab under "My Labs" at https://labs.azure.com. You can drill into the lab and change the title but not this name.
6 votes -
Give Warning to Users About Shutdown
Currently, when a shutdown is initiated in the schedule, it force quits all programs and shuts down the machine without any notice to the user. This abrupt of a shutdown could result in a loss of work if the user is active at the time of the scheduled shutdown. Please provide an option when scheduling a shutdown to give notice to the user (see attached for an example). This can be achieved with the simple command: shutdown /s /t 300
6 votes -
Assign multiple VMs to a student with their own vnet so they can create a network
We have an in house lab experience where we can assign multiple windows/Linux VMs to students, these all come with a public IP and part of a Vnet so they can create their own network and test client/server applications between them
5 votes -
Enable Tagging to either be applied via Policy or inherited from the Lab Account
We have to apply Tags to resources so we can charge schools for Azure usage. We use Policies on Resource Groups to Tag resources automatically on creation.
The Lab Account has it Tags created correctly on creation - however, any Labs created within the account do not have tags applied. (The back-end is probably not in the resource group)Can Labs created in a Lab Account obey any polices as if they are also in the resource group - or can they have the option to inherit the tags of the Lab Account they belong to.
We cannot use this…
4 votes -
Bastion support for Classroom Labs
Similar to DevTest Labs, and perhaps even more important, Classroom Labs should support Bastion Host or any other mechanism that gets around port restrictions. Students should be able to get to their virtual machines without having to ask an IT department to grant access through their firewall to non-standard ports (which gets denied more often than not anyway).
4 votes -
Speed up user lab VM reset by assigning an unassigned VM from the pool
When you reset a VM assigned to a user, it will delete the existing VM, create a new VM and then assign it to the user.
If there are unassigned VMs in the pool, please assign one of these to the user so that they can get back on immediately. There should be no need to wait for an additional VM to be added into the pool before it is assigned to a user.
4 votes -
'My Labs' Dashboard cards should display more information
The dashboard cards in labs only contains minimum information on the e.g.
LAB-TITLE
lab description
Max virtual machine count: 52
Quota per user: 0 hours (Schedule only)it does not even list the Lab Creator anywhere!
it really needs to be better especially when end users have multiple labs from different creators, schedules etc.It would be nice if the cards in the dashboard listed:
The Lab creator - fetched from Graph with user image and mail address.
The name of image in use, possibly an image logo
The actual schedule (if configured)
custom support linkThe count of registered…
4 votes -
Provide the ability to add classroom resources for each lab
It would be great to have the ability to add some more helpful assets to the classroom lab, like a list of e-book codes (csv) that can be redeemed by each user as he/she claims each VM. Also we should be able to upload a Lab guide, some reference links etc., for use by the students during the class.
4 votesThank you for your suggestion. We already have this feature in our feature backlog.
-
Be able to download list of users
I really like the new classroom labs. One feature I would like is to be able to not only upload a list of users but also be able to download the list of users after a class have completed.
4 votesThanks for your suggestion. We added this feature to our backlog and will prioritize this feature appropriately.
-
Windows Server 2019
When can we expect to see Windows Server 2019 images available?
4 votes -
More options of virtual machine size and access other port
Are there any plans to add more options of virtual machine size same as the options of the DevTest Labs, we feel it too high specifications for a Linux terminal.
Currently, the small size is 2 cores, 3.5GB RAM and cost of USD 0.20/hr. If there will be lesser specifications which also lower the cost. The current setup of Lab Services assumes that you're using GUI or particularly on Windows.
Hope there is an option to tunnel a specific port(s) not just ssh and rdp. If we make web services (80,443) that too can be accessible to that option. Another…
3 votes -
Show Which Labs Have an Active User Logged In
It would be useful for the virtual machine list to show which machine has a user actively logged in so as administrators/instructors we can know which machines can be stopped without interfering with a student's work.
3 votes -
Make it more affordable for nonprofits
Nonprofits can't afford to pay $0.20/hour to run VMs for a library or classroom. For 10 machines to be running and used during lab hours, that's $1-2K/week. It's just way outside of their budgets.
3 votes -
Very small compute VM required
The ALS solution is fantastic but please consider providing a very small compute instance in the solution. The current Small Compute VM is TOO powerful (and therefore expensive) for our requirements.
Please consider a very small compute size similar to the Azure Virtual Machine -A1 v2 with 1 CPU and 2GB RAM. (or even smaller!).
This would still be suitable for most of our Linux labs, and significantly drive down the cost of using the solution, thus making it more appealing.
2 votes -
Accessing one lab pc by multiple users
Is there any way to handle one PC by multiple people or managing one project in one machine by multiple people?
2 votes
- Don't see your idea?