Before we implemented Azure Labs, professors at the school were using on-premises labs. However, with the pandemic and students working remotely, it became difficult for them to use the labs. To solve this, we implemented Azure Virtual Desktop, but it was harder for professors to create templates without involving IT. With Azure Labs, professors can now create their own templates and manage their own schedules, which works better for them.
The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the professor's administrative segregation of permission which is already in place. We give the professor rights to one of the labs, he owns that lab, so he can create a template, and he can create a schedule without relying on us for help. The UI is very straightforward. Nothing too fancy with Azure nowadays, they change the UI it seems every day. We stumble upon different features and configuration changes all the time.
The solution can be improved by adding additional languages for the UI in order to support international students.
I have been using the solution for a year.
I give the stability of the solution a ten out of ten.
The solution is stable. After we implement we should perhaps, revisit and ask the professors, educators, or IT people if they have measured outages or issues. We haven't received any complaints, so the solution must be working well.
The solution is scalable.
There are thousands of people using the solution. We have local IT, which is the administrator. They give the educators, professors, and teachers, their own Azure Lab. The professors then, whoever's enrolled in their classes, give the students permission to access their lab.
I give the initial setup a nine out of ten.
When comparing what the customers have now to what we offer, they have Horizon and VMware Horizon VDI. Azure Virtual Desktop is less expensive than those two options.
I give the solution a nine out of ten.
Azure Virtual Desktop tends to be a problem for us, but Azure Lab Services is pretty straightforward.
The educational institution we deal with has a small IT department, with only a few people, including the director and their networking people, and the firewall team. I have not met all of their administrators, so I can't provide an exact number of administrators. I don't know if other IT people are delegated the permission or role. But for the ones we implemented, I deal with less than five people.
This solution is a competitor of all the VDIs out there right now. The solution's target audience is entities such as academia and educational institutions that need to provide virtual machines with customized templates.
We've just been given a project to use a new product that we're not sure how new it is. We know about it and its inception, but don't know when it was first created. We've never had a customer that actually needed it before, but it does come in handy when we do Azure Virtual Desktop implementations. For those customers that want more control over their environment, we show them how to create a template and manage the Azure Labs for them. There's a delegation type of feature that's very hard to do with Azure Virtual Desktop implementations until we have to do some administrative components in order to give that type of implementation with actual labs.