How to set-up training labs

Last modified: June 6th, 2021

Note: This documentation is for Dynatrace India ACE Services team. Please don’t read if you are a non-dynatrace person. This document shows how to setup lab in Azure DevTestLabs.

In this document you can find how to set-up labs for training and also it classified into 2 types,

Admin Training
Power User Training

Please check the contents for navigating through the document. It contains several sections and step by step guide to create lab resources for training purposes. For creating labs, using Azure or GCP is recommended.

Pre-requisites
Steps needs to be followed

Pre-requisites

Access to Azure tenant of Dynatrace (At least one subscription access is required)
Admin access to Transform Lab (https://lab.dt-transform.com)
Dynatrace Email ID
Participants email address for sending all the instructions later on.

Steps needs to be followed

Collect the participants details (Name, Email).
Create GitHub issue to notify the activity or to track each changes.
Create atleast 2 VMs for each participant.
Create Dynatrace Environments for users (depends on the type of user).
Email the resource details to each participant from the list you have collected from the customer.

Creating GitHub Issue

Before doing any changes it is the best practice to create a GitHub issue with the details of the change. Please follow that to keep track of your work and also help us to improve. In future there will be an automation included for these issues. In the same repository, you need to create 2 issues one is regarding Access request for Dynatrace Environment and another is for creating VMs in Azure.

Login to GitHub.
Visit out lab repository here.
Go to issues and click on New issue as shown below.
Use the predefined templates to create an issue. Note: Use Access Request teamplate for Environment access and **Resource request ** template for creating virtual Machines.
Follow the instructions in the template and create issues

Creating Virual Machines

Creating Azure DevTestLabs Lab

Navigate to Azure DevTestLabs and login using your Dynatrace account (If you don’t have access to Azure account, please contact gotc@dynatrace.com for the access).
Click on Add at the top left panel and Create Devtest Lab blade will open.
Fill the **Basic details with the details as shown in the below screenshot. (You can fill up your own details for e.g. instead of BT-Training you can fill any other name of the customer).
Go to next step Auto-shutdown by clicking on Next: Auto-shutdown on Basic deatils page (Please don’t click on Review + create as this will directly take you with preconfigured settings.). In this page leave the default settings and let Auto-shutdown to off as shown in screenshot.
Click on Next: Networking and this will take you to Networking step. Please select indiaservices_transform_lab-vnet from the drop down of Virtual Network. Keep Subnet to default. In Network Isolation you can wither Isolate lab instances or go with non-isolation. Foe more details about Network isolation in DevTest Labs, please visit this documentation.
Go to Tags and enter the tags as shown in the below screenshot. In github-issue tag, please specify the issue number created here before creating lab.
Once tags are added, please click on Review + create that will take you to the summary page. Click on Create.
Your lab will be created in 5-10 minutes. You can track the progress in deployment overview page. Once it is created, it will give you success message and a button to navigate to the resource.

Creating Virual Machine in Azure DevTestLabs

Make sure you know the confuiguration of VMs that you need along . with the OS of it. As you might have specified in the GiHub issue earlier.
Go to Azure DevTestLabs and see that lab name you created in previous section. Click on the lab to open it’s Overview page.
Click on Add, Base selectotr page will open and here as per the requirement, search for the Windows 10 Pro.
Selet the latest build release of Windows 10 Pro. In this case, we need to select Windows 10 Pro, Version 21H1.
Once you select the option, it will take you to the VM creation page where you need to enter the name of the VM and an admin user name where all other VMs canbe accessed through that credentials. Please use D4s_v3 size and after selecting the size please sue Standard SSD instead of Standard HDD.
You can go to Advanced settings and leave Virtual network and Subnet selector as it is. If you want to make virtual machine publicly accessible, you need to select Public IP address. Selecty the Expiration date to next 15 days and enter the number of instances it should create, In our case it is 20 so I am using 20 as the number.
Go back to Basic Settings and click on Create.
This will create 20 VMs for us to use it for training. It will take around 15 to 20 minutes to create all the machines. So, sit back and relax for sometime.
Now if you see the screenshot above, all VMs that are created with the rule of Auto-shutdown enabled. If we leave this enabled, it will turn off VM every day at 19:00 Hours. To disable that, got o Configyuration & policies> Auto shutdown policy > select User has no control over the schedule set by lab administrator and save it.
Above step will ensure that you can set Auto shutdowm policy to all the VM at once. Thus, got to Auto-shutdown and turn it off in all VMs in the lab as shown in the screenshot below.
Finally, All VMs are created and now they are ready to start working and do out task. But, all machines are having the same credentials which we gave at the start. So, if you want to create specific user credentials for each machine we need to go into each VM and create a user with the participant name and password.
As shown in above screenshot, navigate to Virtual Machines and select the each virtual machine and select reset password option that is available in options blade of the VM.
Once passwords are reset or users are created for each VM, download the RDP files of each VM and store it in a folder. Mail the RDP files and user credentials to user’s individual emails.

Note: Assign 2 VMs with same credentials because we are providing 2 VMs for every user.

Create Dynatrace Environments for users

Create New Environements
Create User Group
Create User account

Create New Environements

When you collect the naem of the users/participants based on the please procees to login to Tansform Lab
Make sure you have the access to cluster management console.
Once toy login, navigate to Environements > Add another environment > Name the environment in this format, BT - .
Create environment for each user.

Create User Group

To create user group in CMC, go to User authentication from navigation menu and go to User groups
Click on Add new group and add group to have all access to their respective environments.
Create one group to each user and assign that group permission to have admin access to the environemnts that you have created above.
Create group for each user and assign their dedicated environment to them.

Create User account

Go to CMC, in User authentication > User accounts > Add new user.
Fill up details regarding the account such as First Name, Last Name, Email and Username.
Save the details and in next page, make sure you assign the user groupt ot he the user. If not, user will not be able to access the environment.

Email the resources you have created to individual users

After creating VMs and Dynatrace environments to the users, please email those RDP files and passwords that you have created along with usernames. Meanwhile, if you need any help feel free to contact vishruth.harithsa@dynatrace.com at any time.