Using Azure Labs for your Home Lab

For most Home labs you typically want to use a workstation or server with lots of disk and memory. But if you just want a simple lab, that is accessible from anywhere in the world, Azure Labs can be a good option.

Obviously running a lab full time in Azure is going to be quite costly, but you can keep the cost down by using a nested VM in which you can install Hyper-V and run multiple guest VMs for the price of one VM.

Currently the largest nested VM has 8 cores and 32 GB RAM. My biggest complaint with Azure Labs in general is that the maximum VM disk size is 128 GB. Even if using differential disks for your VMs it's hard to fit anything than a domain controller and a few Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines. I know some customers has been able to get exceptions to that, but your mileage might vary on that.

Selecting a nested VM

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Johan Arwidmark

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