Do You Need Virtual Lab?
Imagine you have a practice course (Lab course) such as object-oriented programming or game programming. Your student is work from home and they need computer to build their video games / apps. Some of the student doesn’t have sufficient hardware, but for them is impossible to use the lab during the pandemic. Therefore, the campus should facilitate them by providing virtual lab services. This article will give you a real example the investment of virtual lab. On this article, we will use Azure Lab Services as an example.
How to prepare Virtual Lab
In order to have virtual lab you should buy an Azure or have subscription Commitment.
- Activate your Azure Subscription
- Activate or create Lab Account – Create cloud labs with Azure Lab Services | Microsoft Azure
- Request to support you need to unlock vCPU Quota (optional if you need huge numbers of VM ) – Increase VM-family vCPU quotas – Azure supportability | Microsoft Docs
- Creating template for your course. On this step you can create a template that can be used for any VM. – Create an Azure Compute Gallery for sharing resources – Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Docs
- Applying template to your course. On this step you can provision the template into the VMs – Azure Lab Services documentation | Microsoft Docs
How to calculate the investment
The price structure of the virtual lab
- Shared image. The cost depends on the image you storage – you can see here for Pricing – Managed Disks | Microsoft Azure
- Lab VM. The cost for your lab usage – Pricing – Azure Lab Services | Microsoft Azure
- The storage of your VM. The cost for your storage VM Pricing – Managed Disks | Microsoft Azure
Let’s do some quick examples.
- You have 20 students.
- Each students will have an access to a VM for 100 hours of learning
- The VM will contain Game Programming software such as Windows + Unity + Visual Studio. The size of VM is 100 GB.
- The VM will have Large (8 core(s), 16 GB RAM) – Lab Units 70 (you can see on Pricing – Azure Lab Services | Microsoft Azure)
The investment will be
Shared Image. It costs 100 GB. In managed disk, there is a 128 GB managed disk. So the cost will be 19,71 USD
Managed Storage. It costs 128 GB , so it will 19,71 USD x 20 VM = 394,2 USD
Lab VM. It cost 20 x 100 x 0,01 x 70 = 1400 USD
There for you need budget 1400 + 394,2 + 19,71 = 1813,91 USD
Of course, it is excluded tax and services
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