Renaming used resources

AutomatedLab offers the ability to select different resource names for your lab machines as well as virtual switches. While this feature is mainly intended for on-premises hypervisors like Hyper-V, Azure-based labs can also make use of the new resource naming.

This feature is very useful for classroom deployments if students are using a shared hypervisor, as the same lab can be deployed multiple times.

Both Add-LabVirtualNetworkDefinition as well as Add-LabMachineDefinition can use the ResourceName parameter.

Important: This feature does not overcome the boundaries of networking on Hyper-V. Remember to use non-overlapping address spaces for each lab network, as shown in the example.
For various reasons, AutomatedLab uses Internal virtual switches on Hyper-V.

Example

foreach ($studentNumber in (1..10))
{
    New-LabDefinition -Name "$($studentNumber)POSH" -DefaultVirtualizationEngine HyperV
    Add-LabVirtualNetworkDefinition -Name VMNet -ResourceName "$($studentNumber)VMNet" -AddressSpace "192.168.$($studentNumber).0/24"
    Add-LabMachineDefinition -Name DC01 -ResourceName "$($studentNumber)DC01" -Roles RootDC -Domain contoso.com -OperatingSystem 'Windows Server 2016 Datacenter'
    Install-Lab
}

In the sample, the resources deployed on Hyper-V will be prefixed with Studentxx, while each student uses the VM host name to interact with the machine. Specifying a resource name for the virtual network adapter in this case would not be necessary, as the default adapter name is equal to the lab name.