Quickstart: Create a lab using the Azure Lab Services portal

Educators can create labs containing VMs for students using the Azure Lab Services portal. This quickstart shows you how to create a lab with Windows 11 Pro image. Once a lab is created, an educator configures the template, adds lab users, and publishes the lab.

Prerequisites

To complete this quick start, make sure that you have:

• Azure subscription. If you don’t have one, create a free account before you begin.
• Lab plan. If you haven't create a lab plan, see Quickstart: Create a lab plan using the Azure portal.

Create a lab

The following steps show how to create a lab with Azure Lab Services.

1. Sign into the Azure Lab Service portal.

2. Select New lab.

   

3. In the New Lab window, choose the basic settings for the lab.

   1. Set the Name to Lab 101.

   2. Set the Virtual machine image to Windows 11 Pro.

   3. Set the Virtual machine size to Medium.

      

   4. On the Virtual machine credentials page, specify default administrator credentials for all VMs in the lab. Specify the name and the password for the administrator. By default all the student VMs will have the same password as the one specified here.

      

   Important

   Make a note of user name and password. They won't be shown again.

   1. On the Lab policies page, leave the default selections and select Next.

      

   2. You can create a lab with a customizable template VM, or with a VM image that has no customization.

      • Template labs allow you to create a customizable template VM for the class and add software to it for the class. Your base image can be from an Azure Marketplace image or from your IT department through an Azure Compute Gallery.
      • Templateless labs don't allow you to install any further software or tools on your image. You can use an Azure Marketplace image with the tools you need already installed, an image exported from a previous lab, or a pre-configured image supplied by your IT department. Templateless labs take around 5 minutes to create.
        
      1. To create a lab with a customizable template, on the Template virtual machine settings window, leave the selection on Create a template virtual machine.

      

      Or:

      ii. To create a templateless lab, on the Template virtual machine settings window, select Use virtual machine image without customization.

      

4. You should see the following screen that shows the status of the template VM creation.

   

5. When the lab is completed, you'll see the Template page of the lab.

   

   If you're using a templateless lab, you'll see the following note on the Template page, indicating that template customization has been disabled for this lab:

   

Clean up resources

When no longer needed, you can delete the lab.

On the tile for the lab, select three dots (...) in the corner, and then select Delete.

On the Delete lab dialog box, select Delete to continue with the deletion.

Troubleshooting

Lab creation fails with You are not authorized to access this resource

When you create a new lab plan, it might take a few minutes for the permissions to propagate to the lab level. You can assign the Lab Creator role at the resource group level to prevent this behavior:

1. In the Azure portal, go to the resource group that contains the lab plan.
2. Select Access control (IAM) from the left navigation.
3. Select Add > Add role assignment.
4. Assign the Lab Creator role to the user account.

Next steps

In this quickstart, you created a lab with Azure Lab Services. To learn more about advanced options for labs, see Tutorial: Create and publish a lab.

Advance to the next article to learn how to configure the template VM.

Configure a template VM