access azure lab services via https

Question

Hi there,
I'm using Azure Lab services for my trainings, it would be great to use HTML5 as connection protocol instead of the pure RDP connection.

Yours
Franz-Georg

Answer 1

@fgc ,
What does it mean to use HTML5 as a communication protocol? Are you referring to HTTPS? In Azure lab services, each lab is isolated by its virtual network. Students connect to their virtual machines through a load balancer. No student virtual machines have a public IP address; they only have a private IP address. The connection string for the student will be the public IP address of the load balancer and a random port between 49152 and 65535. Inbound rules on the load balancer forward the connection, depending on the operating system, to either port 22 (SSH) or port 3389 (RDP) of the appropriate virtual machine. An NSG prevents outside traffic on any other ports.

Azure Bastion is a new fully platform-managed PaaS service you provision inside your virtual network. It provides secure and seamless RDP/SSH connectivity to your VMs directly in the Azure portal over SSL. I heard, Bastion support for Azure Lab Services is still in preview, but by adding ‘?feature_bastion=true’ at the end of the URL after visiting labs.azure.com, you would get an additional option to create Labs that would use bastion to connect to Lab VMs.

You can also share your idea with the Azure engineering team through the below URL. They will verify and take up in their future backlog.
https://feedback.azure.com/d365community/forum/bf4173d7-b243-ec11-8c62-000d3a1d6d97#