Set up a lab for Adobe Creative Cloud

Članak
06/10/2022
6 min. za čitanje

Note

This article references features available since the August 2022 Update, in which lab plans replaced lab accounts. For more information, see What's New in the August 2022 Update.

Adobe Creative Cloud is a collection of desktop applications and web services used for photography, design, video, web, user experience (UX), and more. Universities and K-12 schools use Creative Cloud in digital arts and media classes. Some of Creative Cloud’s media processes may require more computational and visualization (GPU) power than a typical tablet, laptop, or workstation support. With Azure Lab Services, you have flexibility to choose from various virtual machine (VM) sizes, including GPU sizes.

In this article, we’ll show how to set up a class that uses Creative Cloud.

Licensing

To use Creative Cloud on a lab VM, you must use Named User Licensing, which is the only type of licensing that supports deployment on a virtual machine. Each lab VM has internet access so that your students can activate Creative Cloud apps by signing into the software. Once a student signs in, their authentication token is cached in the user profile so that they don’t have to sign in again on their VM. Read Adobe’s article on licensing for more details.

Lab configuration

To set up this lab, you need an Azure subscription and lab account to get started. If you don't have an Azure subscription, create a free account before you begin.

Lab plan settings

Once you get have Azure subscription, you can create a new lab plan in Azure Lab Services. For more information about creating a new lab plan, see the tutorial on how to set up a lab plan. You can also use an existing lab plan.

Enable the settings described in the table below for the lab plan. For more information about how to enable marketplace images, see the article on how to specify Marketplace images available to lab creators.

Lab plan setting	Instructions
Marketplace image	Enable the Windows 10 image, if not done already.

Lab settings

For instructions on how to create a lab, see Tutorial: Set up a lab. Use the following settings when creating the lab.

Lab settings	Value/instructions
Virtual Machine Size	Small GPU (Visualization). This VM is best suited for remote visualization, streaming, gaming, encoding using frameworks such as OpenGL and DirectX.
Virtual Machine Image	Windows 10

The size of VM that you need to use for your lab depends on the types of projects that your students will create. Most Creative Cloud apps support GPU-based acceleration and require a GPU for features to work properly. To ensure that you select the appropriate VM size, we recommend that you test the projects that your students will create to ensure adequate performance. The below table shows the recommended VM size to use with Creative Cloud.

Warning

The Small GPU (Visualization) virtual machine size is configured to enable a high-performing graphics experience and meets Adobe’s system requirements for each application. Make sure to choose Small GPU (Visualization) not Small GPU (Compute). For more information about this virtual machine size, see the article on how to set up a lab with GPUs.

GPU drivers

When you create the lab, we recommend that you install the GPU drivers by selecting the Install GPU drivers option in the lab creation wizard. You should also validate that the GPU drivers are correctly installed. For more information, read the following sections:

Template machine configuration

Creative Cloud deployment package

Installing Creative Cloud requires the use of a deployment package. Typically, the deployment package is created by your IT department using Adobe’s Admin Console. When IT creates the deployment package, they also have the option to enable self-service. There are a few ways to enable self-service for the deployment package:

Create a self-service package.
Create a managed package with self-service elevated privileges turned on.

With self-service enabled, you don’t install the entire Creative Cloud collection of apps. Instead, students can install apps themselves using the Creative Cloud desktop app. Here are some key benefits with this approach:

The entire Creative Cloud install is about 25 GB. If students install only the apps they need on-demand, this helps optimize disk space. Lab VMs have a disk size of 128 GB.
You can choose to install a subset of the apps on the template VM before publishing. This way the student VMs will have some apps installed by default and students can add more apps on their own as needed.
You can avoid republishing the template VM because students can install more apps on their VM at any point during the lifetime of the lab. Otherwise, either IT or the teacher would need to install more apps on the template VM and republish. Republishing causes the students’ VMs to be reset and any work that isn’t saved externally is lost.

If you use a managed deployment package with self-service disabled, students won’t have the ability to install their own apps. In this case, IT must specify the Creative Cloud apps that will be installed.

Read Adobe’s steps to create a package for more information.

Install Creative Cloud

After the template machine is created, follow the steps below to set up your lab’s template virtual machine (VM) with Creative Cloud.

Start the template VM and connect using RDP.
To install Creative Cloud, download the deployment package given to you by IT or directly from Adobe’s Admin Console.
Run the deployment package file. Depending on whether self-service is enabled or disabled, this will install Creative Cloud desktop app and\or the specified Creative Cloud apps. Read Adobe’s deployment steps for more information.
Once the template VM is set up, publish the template VM’s image that is used to create all of the students’ VMs in the lab.

Storage

As mentioned earlier, Azure Lab VMs have a disk size of 128 GB. If your students need extra storage for saving large media assets or they need to access shared media assets, you should consider using external file storage. For more information, read the following articles:

Save template VM image

Consider saving your template VM for future use. To save the template VM, see Save an image to a compute gallery.

When self-service is enabled, the template VM’s image will have Creative Cloud desktop installed. Teachers can then reuse this image to create labs and to choose which Creative Cloud apps to install. This helps reduce IT overhead since teachers can independently set up labs and have full control over installing the Creative Cloud apps required for their classes.
When self-service is disabled, the template VM’s image will already have the specified Creative Cloud apps installed. Teachers can reuse this image to create labs; however, they won’t be able to install additional Creative Cloud apps.

Troubleshooting

Adobe Creative Cloud may show an error saying Your graphics processor is incompatible when the GPU drivers or the GPU is not configured correctly.

Screenshot of Adobe Creative Cloud showing an error message that the graphics processor is incompatible.

To fix this issue:

Ensure that you selected the Small GPU (Visualization) size when you created your lab. You can see the VM size used by the lab on the lab's Template page.
Try manually installing the Small GPU Visualization drivers.

Cost

In this section, we’ll look at a possible cost estimate for this class. We’ll use a class of 25 students with 20 hours of scheduled class time. Also, each student gets 10 hours quota for homework or assignments outside scheduled class time. The virtual machine size we chose was Small GPU (Visualization), which is 160 lab units.

25 students * (20 scheduled hours + 10 quota hours) * 160 Lab Units * 0.01 USD per hour = 1200.00 USD

Important

Cost estimate is for example purposes only. For current details on pricing, see Azure Lab Services Pricing.

Next steps

The template image can now be published to the lab. For more information, see Publish the template VM.

As you set up your lab, see the following articles: