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I have a VM image blob that students use to create Labtainers VMs within their own free individual Azure student accounts. This has worked fine for months, but it appears that newer student accounts are failing due to a size limit. The blob is 30G. Students are getting this error:
ERROR: {"error":{"code":"InvalidTemplateDeployment","message":"The template deployment failed with error: 'The resource with id: '/subscriptions/b93d8937-e577-4311-81b5-415ee8ac9bbe/resourceGroups/labtainerResources/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/myname-labtainervm' failed validation with message: 'The requested size for resource '/subscriptions/b93d8937-e577-4311-81b5-415ee8ac9bbe/resourceGroups/labtainerResources/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/myname-labtainervm' is currently not available in location 'westus3' zones '' for subscription 'b93d8937-e577-4311-81b5-415ee8ac9bbe'. Please try another size or deploy to a different location or zones. See https://aka.ms/azureskunotavailable for details.'.'."}}
Is that a temporary error, or has something fundamentally changed regarding what free accounts can do?
Ignore the tags.
Hi,
The error states that the specified size is not available in the specified region, which is west us 3.
You can either choose different size or different region to proceed further.
Regards,
Karthik Srinivas
Yes, that is what the error says.
Students cannot "choose a different size" because they need to run the Labtainers VM image. And students cannot choose a different region because the blob image used to create the VM is in westus3. Do I need to create, maintain and pay for blob images in each MS region so that students can play whack-a-mole with arbitrary changing size restrictions?
Unfortunately, the size which you are trying to deploy is subjected to availability of the nodes within the data center where you are deploying your resources. You can use a different regions when you upload the image to a shared image gallery where you have an option to pull the same image irrespective of the region you uploaded. Link: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/blog/azure-shared-image-gallery-now-generally-available/
@Thompson, Michael (Mike) (CIV)
Sorry that you are facing this frustrating situation when working with your students. I am adding some additional context and suggestion to the above answer.
Ensuring capacity for our customers is a top priority for Microsoft and we are working around the clock to deliver on this. The increasing demand for Azure services is evidence of the popularity of Azure, and emphasizes the need to scale up our infrastructure even more rapidly. With that in mind, we are expediting expansion and are improving our resource deployment process to respond to this strong customer demand. We have identified several improvements on how we load-balance under a high resource usage situation, and how to trigger the timely deployment of needed resources. Furthermore, we are increasing our capacity significantly – and will continue to plan for strong customer demand across all of our regions. This September 2021 blog post covers improvements towards delivering a resilient cloud supply chain.
Since you are working with students you might consider using Azure Lab Services. You have more flexibility to find available capacity when your lab account is not peered to a VNet. In this case, Azure Lab Services automatically looks for available VM capacity across all regions in the same geography as the lab account. However, you still may not be able to choose a VM size if none of the regions have available capacity. For example, currently in Canada, GPU sizes (e.g. NV series) are not offered in any regions. As a result, you must create your lab account in a geography that does have GPUs available. You also can configure a setting called enable location selection (this setting is only available when your lab account is not peered to a VNet). This setting allows lab creators to choose a different geography from the lab account when they create a lab. Enabling this option gives lab creators the greatest flexibility to find a region that has available capacity for a VM size.
Hopefully this suggestion helps, and you can work around this issue. Please let me know if there are any other questions or issues I can assist with.
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Azure Lab Services is not an option. Labtainers, which I maintain, is used by educators worldwide. They are not my students. Labtainers on Azure had been an alternative for students who could not run a VM on their laptop, e.g., due to the M1 chip on Macs. However, feedback from testers has convinced me that students can no longer reliably create a VM using Azure for Students. Several different VM sizes and regions were tried. This previously worked. Now you have added new limitations, causing considerable disruption to courses.
The Labtainers documentation will be revised to warn instructors and students away from use of Azure Student accounts for Labtainers, and suggest the use of the GCP, which we support as a 2nd cloud platform. I'd be happy to revisit this should Azure for students become usable, or if Azure has an alternative that does not involve my suggesting that instructors purchase Azure services.
Thanks,
--Mike
@Thompson, Michael (Mike) (CIV)
I understand your frustration. The fact that this was previously working and reliable and now it is not due to circumstances out of your control is definitely frustrating. I don't believe these issues you are facing are due to new limitations. The issue is caused by an increase in utilization by other users which has reduced the available capacity. I suggested Azure Lab Services since it has built in logic to find a region and size with available capacity. My recommendation is to include such logic into Labtainers.
The fact is that old student accounts do not have this problem. According to the testers, old student accounts have been able to create VMs in a variety of regions. with no problem Attempts to create VMs in those very same regions with new student account fail. Clearly something changed other than usage by others. I do not have a student account, so it not possible for me to observe or try to make sense of these limitations. And assuming I could test as a new student account, how would I go about locating a region with the available capacity? Is there an API for that, other than trial and error?
Also, these are simple, single VMs. It is not like the student accounts are requesting a lot of resources.
I see there is a "az vm list-skus" command. But no way to filter on what a (new) student subscription would see. One tester found that Western Europe was listed as having capacity for a new student account to create a vm. But the resource creation command failed.
Apologies for the delayed follow up. I did get some confirmation and further explanation to share.
I confirmed we are currently prioritizing existing subscriptions over newly-created subscriptions in that region. Existing customers, can request that new subscription(s) be enabled for their preferred region – these are reviewed and approved on a case by case basis. Please create a new support request - select an issue type of 'Service and subscription limits (quotas)", the relevant subscription and resource quota type.
One useful tool to check is the Allocation Success Recommender, which can be found und the Diagnose and solve problems blade.
Thank you for the follow up. I would consider recommending that students try the Allocation Success Recommender, but it seems a lot to ask students who are just trying to do a simple lab. I'm inclined to leave in place the recommendation that students avoid Azure Student accounts for now, and use GCP. Otherwise it seems likely that students (and their instructors) will get a bad impression of Labtainers, and Azure as well. Is there any way I can be notified in the event the Azure infrastructure problems get resolved, so that I can update the guides?