Skip to content

Lab Environment Setup

Every lab in this curriculum can run in three target environments. We provide the lab building solutions — Bicep, Terraform, and PowerShell — and either the student or the lab moderator deploys them depending on the delivery format.

Target environments

A. Azure (cloud-hosted)

A nested-virtualization Azure Local lab built inside an Azure VM. No on-premises hardware required.

  • Use for: on-demand self-paced learners, online live workshops where students don't have lab hardware
  • Built by: our Bicep templates in labs/iac/
  • Cost: the student's (or workshop's) Azure subscription
  • Prerequisites: Azure subscription, contributor access, quota for the workshop's VM SKU

B. Physical Hyper-V server (nested environment)

A student's or customer's existing physical Hyper-V server runs the lab as nested VMs.

  • Use for: students with hardware already on a Hyper-V host, customers who want labs on-prem without cloud cost, instructor-provided physical lab kit at an in-person workshop
  • Built by: PowerShell + DSC scripts in labs/iac/onprem/ (planned)
  • Cost: none beyond the existing hardware
  • Prerequisites: physical Hyper-V host with nested virtualization enabled, sufficient RAM/CPU/storage for the lab's VMs

C. Actual Azure Local hardware

The student or customer's own production or pilot Azure Local cluster.

  • Use for: customers running Azure Local in production who want operators trained against real hardware, on-site delivery at a customer location
  • Built by: N/A — environment already exists
  • Cost: none beyond existing cluster
  • Prerequisites: Azure Local cluster deployed and Arc-registered, contributor access on the cluster resource group, credentials for a cluster node

Deployment patterns

Whichever environment is chosen, the lab is provisioned in one of two patterns:

Student-deployed (self-guided / on-demand)

The student runs the provided template against their own subscription or hardware. Used for on-demand self-paced classes.

  • Templates live under labs/iac/
  • A shared base at labs/iac/shared/ provisions the common substrate; per-module templates layer on top
  • Each template includes a cleanup.ps1 so resources can be destroyed when the lab ends

Moderator-deployed (instructor-led, in-person)

For in-person workshops, the lab moderator deploys one shared environment or a per-participant batch ahead of time. Students consume the environment without managing infrastructure.

  • The same templates power this — the moderator runs them with a participantCount parameter
  • Moderator distributes credentials at the start of the workshop and runs cleanup at the end

Lab index

Lab guides are mapped to modules where applicable. See the individual module pages for the lab content.

Module Hands-on Type
01 — Azure Arc Deep Dive Demo
02 — Compute Lab — Arc VM + Bicep
03 — Storage Lab — S2D volumes, ReSync
04 — Core Networking Lab — Network ATC, RDMA
05 — SDN Lab — Arc-managed SDN deploy, SLB
07 — Deployment Lab — deploy cluster (S2D, AD, Portal path)
08 — Post-Deployment Configurations Lab — RBAC, storage paths, VM images, logical networks
09 — Management Lab — Portal/CLI/WAC/OMSWAC tour
10 — Security & Compliance Lab — BitLocker, Policy, Defender
11 — Observability & Monitoring Lab — Monitor, Insights, dashboards
12 — Troubleshooting Lab/Demo — break-fix
13 — BCDR Lab — ASR, Backup, DR test
14 — Day-2 Operations Lab — Update Manager, LCM
15 — AKS on Azure Local Lab — deploy AKS cluster
16 — Azure Virtual Desktop Lab — host pool, FSLogix
17 — IoT Operations Lab — OPC UA → MQTT → Event Hubs
18 — Azure AI Foundry Local Lab — Phi-4-mini sovereign chat
19 — Migration Lab/Demo — VMware → Azure Local

IaC templates for each module live in labs/iac/<module>/.