This article covers steps for creating a Microsoft Azure hands-on lab within Content Engine. This article augments the general-purpose Provisioning Templates for Custom Hands-on Labs article.

Provisioning Templates

A provisioning template lets you customize the resources that are available to students while completing your custom hands-on labs. 

Note: A provisioning template is not mandatory for a custom hands-on lab. If you customize the provisioning template incorrectly, users will be unable to start the lab and will see an error message instead. You can skip or remove the provisioning template if you do not need it.

If you want to customize the provisioning template, QA provides a couple of examples during the lab creation process. You can use the examples a starting point and adjust as needed, or you can start from scratch if you know how to use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates.

Template Limitations

Hands-on labs enforce the following limitations. If students exceed these limits, the system terminates the lab session:

• Resources can only be created in the lab’s assigned resource group.
• Resources can only be created in US regions.
• Creating 10 or more computing instances at a time is not permitted.
• Virtual Machine Scale Sets are allowed to have a maximum of 3 instances.
• Using 10 or more CPUs across all VMs is not permitted.
• Only the following VM SKUs are allowed:
  • Basic_A0
  • Basic_A1
  • Standard_A1_v2
  • Standard_A2_v2
  • Standard_B1ms
  • Standard_B1s
  • Standard_B2ms
  • Standard_B2s
  • Standard_D2s_v3
  • Standard_D4s_v3
  • Standard_B4ms
• Total Disk size cannot exceed 150GB.
• Using an accelerator (GPU) is not permitted.
• Only the Azure Container Registry basic SKU is allowed.
• AKS Clusters must be created with Container monitoring disabled.
• Only the D1, F1, B1, S1, Y1 (Consumption-based) App Service Plan SKUs are allowed.
• Only the Free, Basic, S0, and 2 vCore SQL Database SKUs are allowed and advanced data security must be turned off. (Select Not now for Enable Azure Defender for SQL on the Additional settings tab.)
• Attempting to use resources for mining of cryptocurrency is not permitted.
• Excessive Network Traffic is not permitted.
• DDoS or Port Scanning External Hosts is not permitted.